Australian Prints, Drawings and Photographs

The Gallery also has an extensive collection of Australian prints, drawings and photographs with special emphasis on South Australian works, including a collection of 2000 Hans Heysen drawings which were bequeathed to the Gallery by the artist. The Gallery’s Australian prints and drawings reflect the strength of the paintings collection with strong holdings of colonial and modernist works as well as some fine examples of contemporary printmaking. Also to be found among the Australian works on paper are over 200 of Lionel Lindsay’s prints and drawings and a similar number of prints by Adelaide artist Barbara Hanrahan.

H.H. Tilbrook, Australia, 1848-1937 Corset Rock, 1898, Bungaloo Bay, South Australia gelatin-silver photograph, 37.9 x 28 cm (image) R.J. Noye Collection Gift of Douglas and Barbara Mullins 2004

In 1922 the Gallery was the first in Australia to begin collecting photographs as fine art with acquisitions being made throughout the 1920s and 30s. Since the 1970s the photography collection has been continuously strengthened, with an emphasis on South Australian photography as well as excellent examples of contemporary photographic media.  In 2004 the Gallery acquired the R.J. Noye collection of early South Australian photography comprising some several thousand items. This collection is of immense significance to South Australia with highlights such as extensive holdings of photographs and glass plate negatives by H.H. Tilbrook (1848-1937) and Paul Foelsche (1831-1914). The collection also includes R.J. Noye’s trial website, Photohistory SA, which has been archived by the Gallery and can be accessed from the link below.

View a selection of images through the Online Gallery

Charles Conder, Australia/Britain, 1868-1909 A holiday at Mentone 1888, Melbourne, oil on canvas, 46.2 x 60.8 cm South Australian Government Grant with the assistance of Bond Corporation Holdings Limited through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation to mark the Gallery's Centenary 1981

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Jacob van Ruisdael  The Netherlands, c.1628-1682 Landscape with a mill-run and ruins c.1653, Haarlem oil on canvas, 59.3 x 66.1 cm Gift of James & Diana Ramsay and the James & Diana Ramsay Fund through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 1985

From its establishment in 1881, the Art Gallery of South Australia acquired expensive examples of contemporary British painting by famous living artists such as Frederic Leighton, George Watts, Edward Poynter, Edward Burne-Jones, J.W. Waterhouse, Benjamin Leader, Vicat Cole and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Fine Pre-Raphaelite pictures by Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti followed later, producing in Adelaide a comprehensive repository of High Victorian Art.

Throughout its history the Gallery has continued to buy in the area of contemporary British art, and today the collection includes among the finest concentrations of paintings and works on paper by members of the Camden Town Group and the Bloomsbury Group outside England, including works by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner, Robert Bevan, Malcolm Drummond and, of course, Walter Sickert.

Of the few continental European paintings bought in the early decades the most notable are by William Bouguereau, Giovanni Segantini, and Henri Fantin-Latour. Much later, paintings by Camille Corot, Charles Daubigny, Théodore Géricault, Eugène Boudin, Auguste Renoir and a group of twenty bronze casts of sculptures by Auguste Rodin were added, forming a solid group of nineteenth-century French paintings and sculptures.

By 1910 media other than painting and sculpture, cultures other than British and earlier art-historical periods were being sought by the Gallery, including important examples of English Arts & Crafts and Morris & Co. decorative arts for which there was a ready market among several wealthy South Australian pioneer families.

The Gallery's excellent collection of works on paper was established in 1907 by a substantial bequest by David Murray of German, Netherlandish, French and Italian Old Master prints, a few drawings and a substantial fund for further acquisitions. Augmented by the famous connoisseur Harold Wright, this area of the Gallery's collection has since become one of the richest, containing examples of the work of a number of the greatest masters of European art: Andrea Mantegna, Albrecht Dürer, Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, Francisco Goya, Édouard Manet and many major modern artists. The Gallery owns drawings by Jacopo Tintoretto, Taddeo Zuccaro, Frederico Barocci, Luca Cambiaso, Anthony van Dyck, Guercino and Giambattista Tiepolo.

The Gallery began to acquire Old Master paintings and sculpture in the middle decades of the twentieth century, and a number of the Gallery's most distinguished European masterpieces have entered the collection in the past two decades. The collection includes major paintings by Claude Lorrain, Salomon van Ruysdael and Jacob van Ruisdael, Gaspard Dughet, Salvator Rosa, Willem van de Velde the younger, Jan Both, Luca Giordano & Giuseppe Recco, Anthony van Dyck, William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, J.M.W. Turner and Theodore Géricault. The two strengths of this part of the Gallery's collection are the European landscape tradition from the seventeenth century and the history of British portraiture since the sixteenth century.

Since the 1970s, the Gallery has broadened its collection of international contemporary art. To the works by such prominent British artists as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Richard Long, have been added American paintings by Andy Warhol and Kenneth Noland and sculptures by Donald Judd and Duane Hanson. The greatest strength of the Gallery's collection, however, is German -- incorporating works by Georg Baselitz, Rainer Fetting, Ulrich Rückriem, A.R. Penck and Nikolaus Lang, who has worked in and around Adelaide using local slate and granite.

View a selection of images through the Online Gallery

Bartolomeo Passerotti, Italy, 1529-1592 The Coronation of the Virgin with Saints Luke, Dominic, and John the Evangelist c.1580, Bologna, Italy oil on canvas, 302.9 x 193.7 cm Mrs Mary Overton Gift Fund 2003

European Collection - Essay