In 1925 Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart1Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart was born on 17 November 1899 in Osnabruck, Germany. He died on 19 December 1962 in Ulm.

In 1879, when he was just thirty-one years of age, the French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage was awarded the prestigious Legion of Honour, signalling the immense breadth of his popularity

When Boccaccio wrote his book, De Claris Mulieribus (Concerning Famous Women) (after 1351), Cleopatra was the epitome of Luxuria, that medieval vice pictured as a bejewelled naked women, the embodiment of extravagant…

   According to Henry-Claude Cousseau, Jean Dubuffet went to the Sahara in 1947, 1948 and 1949 hoping to find a new provocation for his work.1 H

In a lecture at the Pratt Institute in 1958 Mark Rothko explained that ‘it was with the utmost reluctance that I found the figure could not serve my purpose

Boucher was one of those men who indicate the taste of a century, express, personify, embody it. In him, French eighteenth-century taste was manifest, in all the peculiarity of its character

Among various anecdotes narrated by Pliny the Elder that reveal the illusionistic skills of the Greek painters, the one recounting how Zeuxis was deluded by the drapery painted by his rival Parrhasios…

The artist must be … encouraged to speak freely in the ‘language’ which he feels is essential to him for his self-expression, and we must try to learn the l

In 1982 Dame Elisabeth Murdoch endowed the National Gallery of Victoria, through The Art Foundation of Victoria, with a generous fund to commission tapestries to hang in the Great Hall of the…

A figure study by Camille Pissarro recently acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria is not only the first drawing by this major draughtsman of the second half of the 19th century…

In 1982 and 1983 the Gallery made two significant additions to its small collection of contemporary Australian silver – a coffee service by Ragnar Hansen and a teapot by Hendrik Fors

The major frustration for students of the revolutionary 1940s has been that its most important work has remained largely hidden until the last two years

Australian art of the first two to three decades of the twentieth century exists today, if indeed it finds focus at all in the received history of Australian art, beneath a…

On 10 March 1853 the French ship Vesta arrived in Port Phillip from Sydney, en route to Le Havre. Among the cabin passengers were ‘Mr and Mrs Montefiore and famil

Just prior to his death, the British Victorian watercolourist and traveller, turned Royal Academician, John Frederick Lewis (1805–76) stipulated in his will that his remaining works, apart from a bequest to his…