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

The history of painting since Manet (assuming that Manet’s Olympia is, as Malraux declared, the beginning of modern art) appears as a series of technical revolutions, competitively iconoclastic, tending to extremism, each…

Modern scholarship has increasingly focussed attention on the interrelationship of the arts, on the ways in which, for example, the visual arts may complement or inform literary discours

The researching and recording of Australia’s photographic past reached a climax during the Bicentennial year with the publication of a major history and an important survey exhibit

A recent acquisition of watercolours and drawings by Georgiana McCrae (1804–90), Louisa Anne Meredith (1812–95) and Edward La Trobe Bateman (18157–97) has greatly enriched the National Gallery of Victoria’s collection of works…

The coloured copy of William Blake’s set of engravings for Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1797), recently acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria, is one of the most interesting so far described&#

 Essential reasons for the extraordinary development of Dutch painting during the 17th century, according to Johan Huizinga, were ‘the intense enjoyment of shapes and objects, the unshakeable faith in the reality and…

A work which has remained in storage at the National Gallery of Victoria for many years is the small panel called Les jaloux  (The jealous ones) 496/2 (fi

The study of the minor Flemish masters of the end of the 15th century has progressed considerably in recent years

The earliest, and certainly one of the most intriguing, nineteenth-century Australian photographs in the National Gallery of Victoria’s collection is a daguerreotype of three Victorian Aborigines taken by Dougla

The National Gallery of Victoria holds in its collection a fine impression of The poet (fig

The mid-nineteenth-century English artists known as the Pre-Raphaelites are represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria by a group of important paintings and works on paper.

Marshall Claxton’s painting An emigrant’s thoughts of home (1859) (

   The eighty-five-year-old magistrate is shown without the stiff formality of many dogal portraits, almost as though he was ready to converse with the viewer.1 Ε. Pillsbury &

A knowledge of the techniques and materials used by Frederick McCubbin throughout his career, together with a careful examination of the artist’s paintings, reveals McCubbin’s late work to be as technically complex…