three decades later, in 1857, the Sydney-based editor and writer Joseph Sheridan Moore published two articles in The Month on the necessity of establishing a broad program of art education in Australia, quoting Ruskin on the social duty to provide art training for artisans. Moore recommended at the same time the adoption of new, more democratic and advanced approaches to such training, reflecting ideas recently developed in other European countries, especially France and Germany – the antithesis of the traditional fine art academy. He saw this as an essential prerequisite for establishing a new Australian school of painting, proposing not only a government funded Australian Central Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Sydney, but also the creation of professorships of painting, drawing and design “in every Municipal town in the Colony, possessing a Mechanics’ Institute.”3
The role played by Mechanics’ Institutes in colonial Australian society, in promoting not only technical training but also cultural engagement, should not be underestimated. Many of Australia’s first fine art exhibitions were organized in this way, and several regional examples, each quite separate from developments in Melbourne and Sydney, can be selected to demonstrate how the system worked. Ann Galbally has pointed out that the role of the Mechanics’ Institute in colonial Australia was markedly different from Britain where such institutions were firmly focused on improving the training and expertise of working men. In Australia, by contrast, they were enthusiastically taken up by the emerging middle classes, as repositories of libraries, and venues for cultural activities and exchange.4
In 1860, in Launceston in northern Tasmania, the opening of its new Mechanics’ Institute building was celebrated with a fine art exhibition.5 The event was locally significant, with 551 works of art contributed by citizens of Launceston and its surrounding area. Engravings, photogravures, apprentices’ models and other items were mixed in with a broad selection of oil paintings, some described as “after” well-known old masters, and others more optimistic on the matter of authorship. Nostalgia for home was the prevailing driver, with scenic British landscapes predominating. The catalogue began with 102 works (paintings, prints and other media) contributed by the local grandee Joseph Archer of Panshanger, the vast majority of which also represented British scenery and rural activities, in tandem with most other lenders. The exhibition overall was dominated by the 42 works (including some on paper) by John Glover, the talented English “romantic” landscapist who had emigrated to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) late in life to join his sons, who had taken up land there, arriving in the colony in 1831 and remaining until his death in 1849. A smaller group of pictures by another local painter of merit, Robert Dowling, was also notable, with Dowling by then in London well on the way to establishing a serious professional reputation. Launceston took the view that it had something to celebrate in the field of fine art.
In Hobart, two years earlier, an “Art Treasures” exhibition (clearly inspired by the great Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, (reflected also in the 1857 loan exhibition of fine arts presented by the South Australian Institute) had been held in the parliament building,6 contributed by Hobart’s leading citizens. The exhibition consisted mainly of oils, with some watercolors, drawings and sculptures, the majority, not surprisingly, representing the British schools, and the landscape genre in particular. The principal lenders were members of Hobart’s distinguished, and highly artistic Allport family. Even earlier, the Royal Society of Tasmania, established in 1843, regularly displayed and acquired artworks, for which a dedicated building was constructed. The opening exhibition, in 1862, followed the “Art Treasures” model,7 and it is notable that amongst the 271 oil paintings loaned, a substantial proportion were attributed to seventeenth century Italian, Flemish and Dutch masters. Later, in 1885, the society’s art and natural history collections were gifted to the new government-funded Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. It is interesting to note that the original collections of the Hobart Mechanics’ Institute had already been absorbed by the Royal Society of Tasmania’s museum, and thus also passed to the new museum and gallery.
As noted above, the new colony of Victoria, formally separated from New South Wales in 1851, was hugely enriched by the discovery in the same year of one of the world’s largest gold fields. In the succeeding decades, Melbourne grew to become one of the wealthiest cities of the British Empire, its citizens driven by a sense of opportunity and pride, and its rapid development can be compared to American cities like Chicago and San Francisco.
The first official general exhibition in Melbourne, for which a dedicated building was constructed, took place in 1854, as a prelude to the colony’s contributions to the forthcoming 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Mainly concerned with both natural history (especially mineral specimens) and colonial manufactures, it contained a small fine art section, to which local artists like Eugene von Guérard contributed, but it was something of an uninspiring pot-pourri. In contrast, the exhibition arranged in Geelong (a growing port town to the west of Melbourne), at its Mechanics’ Institute three years later, in 1857, contained a similar range of items, but the fine art element was on a larger scale, though still competing with apprentices’ models constructed of wood and cork, natural history specimen tables and colonial manufactures. The local landowner James Henty, one of Victoria’s first settlers, loaned a group of mainly Dutch and Flemish pictures of indeterminate quality and authenticity. The most notable contribution to this exhibition was Ludwig Becker’s 20 “Scenes in Tasmania”, with many representations of indigenous people, accompanied by 18 “Scenes in Victoria”, principally of the goldfields.
These examples reinforce the seminal role played by local Mechanics’ Institutes in providing public access to loan collections of artworks made available by interested local residents. At this early stage, few could be described as committed collectors.
The National Gallery of Victoria
From this point Melbourne began to assume a kind of cultural and artistic pre-eminence. As the city matured, and as private wealth grew, with increasingly grand buildings funded by gold, its civic leaders, led by the irrepressible and ambitious Sir Redmond Barry,8 turned their attention to developing appropriate cultural institutions. In 1861 Melbourne’s – and, indeed, Australia’s – first public art gallery was established (the opening chosen to coincide with Queen Victoria’s birthday) physically situated within the new Public Library building,9 and under the jurisdiction of its board. The early collections of the NGV were typical of their time – a mix of plaster casts of famous antiquities, drawn particularly from the British Museum collections, period marble sculptures, and a miscellany of paintings of various types, mainly British but with some works – principally landscapes and portraits – produced in Australia. The important issue was that the government of the colony was now prepared to assume responsibility for funding Melbourne’s new Museum of Art.
In 1863 the government appointed a Commission on the Fine Arts to “Inquire into the subject of the promotion of the Fine Arts in this our said Colony, and to … submit unto us a scheme for the formation, conduct and management of a Public Museum … and Schools of Art for our said Colony.” Six years after James Sheridan Moore had pleaded for the government of NSW to undertake something similar, to no avail, an ambitious project, to be funded by government, was launched in Melbourne. The eminent painter Sir Charles Eastlake, President of the Royal Academy and director of the London National Gallery, accepted the task of allocating the relatively modest sum of £2000 p.a. made available by the government of Victoria for acquisitions, and he sensibly advised that such a limited sum could only be effective if confined to acquiring contemporary works – and those not necessarily by the most distinguished and sought-after artists. The collections, however, began to grow, and new dedicated spaces for sculptures and pictures were constructed. In 1869 an Act of Parliament formally constituted The National Gallery of Victoria, including its School of Art, which opened in 1870. In due course, most of the public fine art galleries in the capital of each self-governing colony adopted the word “national” in its title, expressing the pre-Federation quasi-independent status of each colony, but also in conscious imitation of London, which had established its “National Gallery”
