start one can identify the stirrings of one of the great, continuing debates of Australian public art museology – the role and status of art produced in Australia, as opposed to the rest of the world. As the collection of mainly British art began to evolve, an early decision of the Commission on Fine Arts, in order to embed art and design as central to the colonial cultural experience, was to allocate £200 (effectively, 10% of the budget) for the winner of a competition for a locally produced work of art. The first major “Australian” work10 to enter the collection was Nicholas Chevalier’s The Buffalo Ranges, acquired in 1864, a good quality realist landscape of a snow-capped mountain range, selected from what was generally regarded as a poor field, with the colony’s finest artist, Eugene von Guérard, abstaining from competing. Eastlake had made it clear that Victoria’s modest acquisitions budget also precluded its public fine art gallery from acquiring major old and modern masters. Conscious of this, in 1869 – the year of the National Gallery of Victoria’s formal incorporation – the trustees embarked upon a huge Loan Exhibition,11 the aim of which was to demonstrate the developing wealth and cultural maturity of the colony through exhibiting the richness of private collections for the benefit of an increasingly engaged public. The exhibition’s content reflected earlier loan collections, but the context and marketing were significantly different. While the quality of works contributed varied considerably, with the same nostalgic emphasis on British landscapes, and a large number of copies of well-known old masters, many high quality works were included, and this perhaps reflected the influence of the new Melbourne Museum of Art.
As the years passed, a kind of modus operandi evolved, given focus by the establishment of the National Gallery of Victoria School of Art (opened in 1870) which in its early years was seen as being at least as important as the art collection. The first Master of the Painting School, Eugene von Guérard, was thus also appointed curator of the collection, almost as a secondary role. Over the years acquisitive prizes and scholarships were created to support the student body, and those who had won prizes (especially the annual Travelling Scholarship for study in London and Paris) were admired and supported above the others. Success in London and Paris was seen as the ultimate test and accolade.
Public Art Museology in the Other Australian Colonies
What, then, was happening in the other Australian colonies from the mid-century? The first phase, with Mechanics’ Institutes and learned societies assuming responsibility for making fine art available to the public, as an expression of civic progress and pride, though with little or no curatorial discipline or thesis, was passing. In Melbourne, a government-funded art collection (and school of art, which, interestingly, became formally linked some years later to the new Working Men’s College, situated on an adjacent site in a Gothic Revival building, the whole program displaying true Ruskinian principles) was bringing focus to a colonial British society’s cultural ambition; furthermore, the two international exhibitions in the 1880s brought to Melbourne thousands of contemporary artworks from around the world (all academic), with several national fine art courts having their own curators and staff.
In many ways, the process of creating significant public art museums in Melbourne, Hobart and elsewhere reflected earlier experience in the United States where, for example, the Boston Athenæum, founded in 1807 in imitation of the Liverpool Athenæum in England, constructed an art gallery in 1827, which organized regular exhibitions of European and American art. When the larger and more ambitious Museum of Fine Arts was established in 1870, most of the Boston Athenæum collection was transferred to the new institution. The process played out in Philadelphia was similar, but with different outcomes.
Given the museological and art education activity in Melbourne in the 1860s and 1870s, it is not surprising that Sydney moved to respond, though without anything like the civic and governmental impetus experienced in Melbourne. In 1871 a meeting of interested people took place in Sydney to discuss establishing an “Academy of Art”, to promote the fine arts through lectures and discussions, exhibitions and art classes, and the Academy’s first exhibition took place the following year.
The formal creation of the Art Gallery of NSW took some time, however. In 1874 the government of NSW granted the Academy £500 for the purchase of art works, and the following year William Piguenit’s Mt Olympus, Lake St. Claire, Tasmania was gifted by 50 subscribers. The 1879 International Exhibition in Sydney required a local response in relation to the public collections of NSW, and an annexe to the main exhibition hall was constructed. After the International Exhibition moved on to Melbourne the following year, the annexe was made available, officially opening in September 1880 as the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In emulation of Melbourne – and of course, London, which was the principal exemplar – it was renamed the “National Art Gallery of New South Wales” in 1883, though it was not formally incorporated by Act of Parliament until 1899. After several false starts, a handsome, classicizing sandstone building was completed and opened in 1906. The National Art Gallery of NSW acquired a group of major, mainly British, pictures in these early years – ranging from Ford Madox Brown’s monumental and highly important Chaucer at the Court of Edward III, 1847–1851, purchased for £500 in 1876, to several major works by Leighton, such as Wedded 1882, purchased in the same year after being first exhibited in London. Overall, in the post-Federation period, the Australian content expanded rapidly, and became a major feature of the visitor experience, supported by annual events such as the Wynne Prize, for “the best landscape painting of Australian scenery,” inaugurated in 1897 and continuing to this day.
A not dissimilar sequence of events occurred in Adelaide, leading to the founding of the National Art Gallery of South Australia. In the colony’s first decades a series of attempts were made to provide cultural and educational activities. By an act of parliament in 1856, the facilities and assets of the first library, and the Mechanics’ Institute, were absorbed into a new South Australian Institute, with the Institute presenting a substantial fine art loan exhibition the following year.12 As early as 1875 gifts were made by individual citizens of Adelaide with a view to forming a public collection, and the International Exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne in 1879–1881 clearly focused attention on what might be done, and the opportunities available. In 1879 the South Australian parliament agreed an annual sum of £2000 for the purchase of art works for a new public gallery, and 21 pictures were acquired from the international fine art collections available in Melbourne the following year. Two rooms to exhibit these and other works were set up in the Public Library, and the new “National Art Gallery of South Australia” was declared open in June 1881. In 1889 the fine art collection was removed to the former Exhibition Building, in the full knowledge this was an unsuitable venue, of considerable concern to the Melbourne and Sydney public galleries which had placed works on loan. Then, in 1897, the single largest philanthropic donation yet made in Australia occurred with the bequest of £25 000 by the wealthy businessman and pastoralist Sir Thomas Elder, for the purchase of pictures. This had a transformative impact, putting Adelaide on the museological map, giving Adelaide’s nascent fine art gallery the ability to purchase major British, European and especially Australian works. The government felt obliged to provide a suitable building, and the bequest inevitably provided an inspiration to the rest of the nation. To this day, the relatively small, but wealthy, city of Adelaide remains a major center of national arts philanthropy.
The Honorary Curator Harry P. Gill – concurrently the director of Technical Art at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts – traveled to London in 1899 and enlisted the help of a London advisory committee of experts, led by Sir Edward Poynter, and key works by Burne-Jones, Leighton and Poynter himself were acquired in the next few years. As always, the prevailing taste was British and academic, though Bouguereau’s magisterial Madonna and Child of 1888 was acquired through the Elder Bequest, followed by Burne-Jones’ Perseus and Andromeda, 1876, in 1902.
The debate on the potential – indeed, necessity – for the six British colonies in Australia to form a national Federation inevitably drew attention to the importance of public institutions building strong collections of Australian art reflecting the Australian experience, and a key response of the Adelaide
