Michael Andrews, a famously slow craftsman, who produced only a handful of paintings compared to fellow artists of his era, is renowned nonetheless as one of the leading figures in…

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 his 1954 autobiography Leda and the Goose, Tristram Hillier was to recall how in 1931, during a hiking trip with friends across the Pyrenees, he had his ‘first glimpse of Spain which seemed to me like a return to China … No grass, no trees, but only rock and tawny earth that stretched away to the shimmering horizon like a lion’s pelt ’. He especially loved the translucent light found in the country’s south, which he felt was invested with ‘a dramatic quality, both noble and cruel’. His Spanish landscapes, like Andalusian farm, 1949, are charged with electric energy and poised in breathless and eer

Although Arthur Hughes was not officially elected to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), he is closely associated with the group and is constantly referred to as a Pre-Raphaelite. He met most of the artists while still a student at the Royal Academy, and he quickly adopted their style. Fair Rosamund is one of his earliest and finest works. The dry and scumbled technique combined with dazzlingly luminous colour is reminiscent of the gouache and watercolours by of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The sorrowful story of Rosamund de Clifford was a particular favourite for artists and poets in the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Rosamund was reputed to be one of the most beautiful women in England and the mistress of King Henry II. Legend has it that in 1176, she was poisoned by the King’s jealous wife Eleanor of Aquitaine. Henry is said to have created a secret garden for Rosamund, accessible only via a maze. Hughes has painted the moment Eleanor, seen lurking in the background, discovers the entrance to the garden, providing her with the opportunity to commit murder. The tall blue Delphiniums close to Eleanor produce a strong poison, indicating the means to dispose of her riva

James Dickson Innes first visited Collioure, a seaside town in the French Mediterranean just north of the Spanish border, with his friend John Fothergill in the spring of 1908. At Collioure, Fothergill recalled, Innes ‘had his fill of heat, light and gaudy local colour, and his all-excelling sense of colour was awakened’. Collioure was to provide the defining moment for Innes’s emerging sense of himself as a landscape artist. The summer of 1911 found him drawn there again and seeking to thin out his oil paintings like watercolour, an effect he has admirably achieved in Collioure, along with a heightening of his overall pa

Samuel Peploe’s earliest still lifes were indebted to the legacy of French Impressionism. Imbued with the spirit of Édouard Manet’s flower paintings of the early 1880s, they paid homage both to Manet’s luscious handling of the oil medium and to the painterly bravura of the seventeenth-century Dutch master Frans Hals. Reproductions after both artists constantly adorned the walls of Peploe’s studio. Around 1900 Peploe moved into a spacious but dark studio space in Devon Place, Edinburgh. Here he crafted jewel-like still-life arrangements in which the objects chosen for consideration were highlighted dramatically against dark bac

In the fifteenth century, on the Venetian island of Murano, a revolution in the manufacture of European glass was unfolding.

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.

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.

This essay was commissioned for and originally published in the Nov/Dec 2018 issue of NGV Magazine.

German-born photographer Horst P. Horst was one of the pre-eminent fashion photographers of the twentieth century.

In July 2016 Maria Grazia Chiuri became the seventh designer and first female creative director at Christian Dior.

This ornately veneered Cabinet on stand, c. 1685, is illustrative of the international orientation of English furniture production in the years following the restoration of Charles II in 1660.