Philip Connard’s Helen and Jane, 1913, a charming study of the artist’s two daughters, did not please everyone on its arrival in Melbourne in 1933. ‘The Connard is not good’, declared The Australasian on 3 March 1933. ‘It is unlovely in flesh colours, and one must feel sorry for “Jane”, who stands behind “Helen” in “Helen and Jane”. She may be in shade, but her grey pallor indicates the necessity for a hospital. The picture has decorative qualities and may please many

In mid May 1938 the then director of the National Gallery of Victoria, J. S. MacDonald, wrote disparagingly of the striking 1909 portrait Rt. Hon.

The Rigg Design Prize is the highest accolade for contemporary design in Australia – a generous legacy of the late Colin Rigg (1895–1982), a former secretary of the NGV’s Felton…

Through the generous auspices of the Felton Bequest, the National Gallery of Victoria has acquired its first example of Dutch seventeenth-century furniture.

A new examination of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Renaissance Profile portrait of a lady For the past sixty years the National Gallery of Victoria has been home to Profile…

In 2004 the National Gallery of Victoria was gifted an early seventeenth-century English painted cabinet (fig. 1).

This essay examines a series of international art projects presented as John Kaldor Art Projects (JKAP) at the National Gallery of Victoria between 1971 and 1977.

In the early 1760s, when Joshua Reynolds painted this portrait of the young Susanna Gale, daughter of a British sugar planter in Jamaica, his success as a society portraitist was…

In the seventeenth century the power of the Republic of the United Netherlands reached its pinnacle.

This dramatic image of animals engaged in mortal combat was a favourite subject for George Stubbs, one of England’s foremost animal painters at the close of the eighteenth centur

For many, the streamlined aesthetic of Nordic design, with its functional yet humanist qualities, epitomises twentieth-century modernism.

When the NGV’s Felton Bequest adviser Frank Rinder recommended the purchase of this sombre yet arresting painting, he warned the Gallery’s trustees that: ‘It would cause considerable disappointment were there…

Among the most mysterious items in the National Gallery of Victoria’s Renaissance collection are two walnut wedding chests (figs 1 and 2

For ninety years the National Gallery of Victoria has been home to one of the most intriguing of all early Netherlandish paintings.

Discovering the first cast of The thinker When the great American Rodin specialist Professor Albert E.