Although Sonia Delaunay and Harriet Whitney Frishmuth never met, if they had they would have found much in common. Both artists were highly educated, multilingual and visually astute.

Mary Beale’s three-quarter-length Self-portrait with husband and son

Women in Britain had long used visual and material culture to make statements about social injustice.1 Deborah Cherry, Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain, 1850–1900, Routledge, London, 2000…

This essay was originally published in the 2019 July/August edition of NGV Magazine.

It is very likely that English artist E.M. Ward designed this remarkable frame specifically for his painting Josephine signing the act of her divorce.

During the second half of the nineteenth century Elizabeth Thompson, later known as Lady Butler, was one of Britain’s most renowned artist

It is an enchanting scene.

Japan in 1920s and 1930s was a time when traditional art and aesthetics merged with European life and culture.

In 1889 the NGV’s Trustees asked the Governor of Victoria, Sir Henry Loch, during a visit he was making to England, to enquire whether Queen Victoria would sit for a…

Exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1887, The first cloud, 1887, is one of William Quiller Orchardson’s finest commentaries on the social life and manners of his time. Orchardson observes a couple who have just returned from an evening out (they are elegantly attired, but there is no fire in the grate). The evening has turned sour; the implication is that this cloud is but the first in a storm that threatens to engulf their marriag

The European mastery of a true hard-paste porcelain technology in Dresden in 1708 was a major scientific, technical and cultural achievement.

In 2015 the National Gallery of Victoria was fortunate to acquire from a private donor a painting by the distinguished British artist George Frederic Watts (1817–1904

In 1877 an engaging portrait drawing of a child by William Dyce (fig. 1) was given to the National Gallery of Victoria by a little-known collector, Duncan Elphinstone Cooper.

When, in 2004, the National Gallery of Victoria purchased a mid nineteenth-century Australian family portrait taken by the South Australian photographer William Millington Nixon, the sitters’ names were unknow

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.