2010.Q1 | artonview 61 Autumn 2010

I S S U E 6 1 • a u t u m n 2 0 1 0

NEW DISPLAYS AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF AUSTRALIA MASTERPIECES FROM PARIS

The National Gallery of Australia is an Australian Government Agency

published quarterly by National Gallery of Australia GPO Box 1150 Canberra ACT 2601 nga.gov.au

Issue 61, autumn 2010

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Anne Gray

ISSN 1323-4552 Print Post Approved pp255003/00078 © National Gallery of Australia 2009 Copyright for reproductions of artworks is held by the artists or their estates. Apart from uses permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part of artonview may be reproduced, transmitted or copied without the prior permission of the National Gallery of Australia.

Enquires about permissions should be made in writing to the Rights and Permissions Officer.

Director’s foreword Masterpieces for the Nation Fund 2010: Robert Dowling’s Miss Robertson of Colac (Dolly)

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Foundation Sponsorship and Development

exhibitions and displays

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Masterpieces from Paris: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and beyond Lucina Ward

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The opinions expressed in artonview are not necessarily those of the editor or publisher.

New look National Gallery of Australia p 16: overview, Ron Radford  p 18: ‘Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly paintings’, Deborah Hart  p 20: ‘Photography’, Gael Newton  p 22: ‘Asian

editor Eric Meredith designer Kristin Thomas

costume’, Beatrice Thompson  p 24: ‘Fashion’, Robert Bell 

photography Eleni Kypridis, Barry Le Lievre, Brenton McGeachie, Steve Nebauer, David Pang, John Tassie

p 26: ‘Jewellery’, Robert Bell  p 28: ‘Polynesian art’, Michael Gunn  p 30: ‘Melanesian art’, Crispin Howarth  p 32: ‘Australian Surrealism’,

rights and permissions Nick Nicholson advertising Erica Seccombe printed in Australia by Blue Star Print, Melbourne enquiries The editor, artonview National Gallery of Australia GPO Box 1150 Canberra ACT 2601 artonview.editor@nga.gov.au

Deborah Hart

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Robert Dowling: Tasmanian son of Empire Ron Radford

acquisitions

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Japan Miyuki: the imperial outing and hunt Lucie Folan

advertising

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Thomas Bock Portrait of two boys

Tel: (02) 6240 6557 Fax: (02) 6240 6427 artonview.advertising@nga.gov.au

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Portrait of three Californian goldminers

RRP $9.95 includes GST Free to members of the National Gallery of Australia For further information on National Gallery of Australia Membership: Membership Coordinator GPO Box 1150 Canberra ACT 2601 Tel: (02) 6240 6504 membership@nga.gov.au

Gael Newton Gael Newton

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Philip Wolfhagen Autumn equinox; the loss of the sun Miriam Kelly

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Murray Griffin Self-portrait Emma Colton

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Fiji A priest’s fork Crispin Howarth

programs and events

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Faces in view Art and about with the Wolfensohn Gift suitcases Mary-Lou Nugent

(cover) Vincent van Gogh Van Gogh’s bedroom at Arles 1889 (detail) oil on canvas 57.5 x 74 cm Musée d’Orsay, Paris, transferred in application of the Peace Treaty with Japan, 1959 © RMN (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

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Travelling exhibitions Mandala workshops in rural schools

Director’s foreword Our summer exhibition, Masterpieces from Paris: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and beyond—Post-Impressionism from the Musée d’Orsay has already attracted over 220 000 visitors from around Australia and the world to the National Gallery of Australia. On Boxing Day alone, over 6000 people came to see the masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay.

The beautifully designed exhibition book has so far sold over 22000 copies.

The decision by the Orsay to tour many of their Post-Impressionist works while renovating their PostImpressionist galleries presented an extraordinary opportunity for us to exhibit these treasures from the beginning of European Modernism for an Australian audience. Post-Impressionism is not well represented in Australian collections and there has never been a Post-Impressionist exhibition in Australia before.

That the Orsay decided on Australia as the first of two international venues for the exhibition was a great coup for Australia and for the National Gallery of Australia.

Thérèse Rein eloquently opened this important exhibition on 3 December.

In preparing for the opening of Masterpieces from Paris we were very excited about the arrival of so many important Post-Impressionist works from the Musée d’Orsay. But, now that the exhibition is here, it has surpassed our wildest expectations. The works are truly revealed under the National Gallery of Australia’s lighting.

Guy Cogeval, president of the Musée d’Orsay, called it a ‘revelation’ to see them here. Having often seen these works in Paris, I have to agree they have never looked better. Of course one of the reasons the Musée d’Orsay is lending the works is that they are renovating their Post-Impressionism galleries, including the installation of a new lighting system.

Masterpieces from Paris has just over month before it ends and already promises to be our most popular exhibition ever. Do make sure you see it!

A week before the opening of Masterpieces from Paris, the Hon Peter Garrett, Minister for the Arts, announced another important milestone in the Gallery’s history—the opening of the final phase of the planned new collection displays in our current building, which completes the four-year program of relocation, refurbishment and redisplay of the collections. The most recently opened spaces include a new purpose-designed oval gallery for our Sidney Nolan Ned Kelly series, our first permanent space designed especially for the art of photography, our first permanent jewellery displays, and our first 2 national gallery of australia

permanent showcases for costumes. Importantly, we also opened Australia’s first gallery, be it small, devoted to Polynesian art and directly upstairs above it a new display devoted to Melanesian art. The space in the Australian displays where the Ned Kelly series used to hang is now devoted to Australian Surrealism, the Gallery having been given, fairly recently, the large Agapitos/Wilson collection of Australian Surrealism. Surrealism, particularly from Australia and Europe, is one of the great strengths of the national collection.

A new acquisition, a Japanese screen titled Miyuki: the imperial outing and hunt 1600–10, has already become a favourite in our downstairs East Asian gallery. The screen is a fine example of the superb achievements of painters during Japan’s Momoyama period with its delicate and refined painting of details of this tale of Gengi. Acquiring this work would not have been possible without the very generous support of Andrew and Hiroko Gwinnett, who continue to show their dedication to bringing the best of Japanese art to Australian audiences.

In the Australian Contemporary space, Tasmanian landscape painter Philip Wolfhagen’s Autumn equinox; the loss of the sun 2009 evokes an earlier era of landscape painting in Australia. Wolfhagen builds up his rich painterly surfaces layer upon layer to reveal atmospheric aspects of his local environment such as seasonal particularities and subtle nuances of light at particular times of day.

We have recently acquired two early daguerreotypes which are among the Gallery’s earliest photographs. The first photograph is a double portrait of two young boys

by Tasmanian colonial portrait painter Thomas Bock, executed around 1848–50. The second is a portrait of three Californian gold miners by an unknown American photographer and also dated from the late 1840s. Bock was an accomplished engraver and portrait painter and turned his hand to photography in the mid 1840s, soon after the first daguerreotype demonstrations in Australia.

These works add to the Gallery’s significant collection of photographs from the first century of photography in Asia and the Pacific, helping to illustrate the vibrant history of photography in the region.

A recently acquired nineteenth-century Fijian priest’s fork is a provocative addition to the new Polynesian gallery.

Used for the ritual consumption of animal and human flesh, this exquisitely decorated object joins other finely crafted works in Australia’s first gallery dedicated to the arts of Polynesia.

The Gallery’s Masterpieces for the Nation Fund program had its most successful year in 2009 with the acquisition of Tom Roberts’s Shearing shed, Newstead 1893–94. I would like to thank those who generously donated to this vibrant colonial-period Australian landscape painting. The subject of the 2010 Masterpieces for the Nation appeal is the evocative portrait Miss Robertson of Colac (Dolly), painted in 1885 and 1886 by Australia’s first locally trained artist, Tasmanian painter Robert Dowling.

It was painted at her family’s Colac property on Dowling’s return to Australia after 27 years abroad. It is one of the artist’s last works and perhaps the finest and most engaging of his late portraits.

Miss Robertson of Colac (Dolly) was briefly on display in the Australian gallery before its inclusion in the National Gallery of Australia’s travelling exhibition Robert Dowling: Tasmanian son of Empire, which fittingly begins its tour in Launceston—at the Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery on 6 March—where Dowling grew up and began his career. The exhibition then travels to Geelong Gallery in Victoria, where the artist set up practice in the mid 1850s, before the exhibition comes to Canberra to the National Gallery of Australia. This exhibition highlights a significant but neglected figure of the late colonial period and shows his importance in the development of Australian art. The book accompanying the exhibition, written by the exhibition curator John Jones, will be the first publication dedicated to Dowling’s work and includes the full range of his much-lauded Oriental, biblical and social-commentary subjects and, importantly, his Aboriginal subjects. It is a major contribution to the history of nineteenth-century Australian art.

With the exhibition Masterpieces from Paris and the new collection displays, the National Gallery of Australia confirms its place as a leader in the Australian art museum world. Through the extraordinary efforts of the National Gallery of Australia Council and the Gallery staff, we will continue to present the very best of the world’s art to audiences in Australia and beyond.

Maurice Denis Landscape with green trees (Green trees) (Procession under the trees) 1893 oil on canvas 46 x 43 cm Musée d’Orsay, Paris, accepted in lieu of tax, 2001 © RMN (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski © Maurice Denis. ADAGP/ Licensed by Viscopy, 2009

Ron Radford AM Director

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Masterpieces for the Nation Fund Robert Dowling’s Miss Robertson of Colac (Dolly) Since it was initiated in 2003, the Masterpieces for the Nation Fund has assisted the Gallery in acquiring seven significant works for the national collection. Last year was our most successful campaign to date, and we hope to improve on this record with this year’s appeal for Robert Dowling’s fascinating nineteenth-century portrait of Miss Robertson of Colac.

Robert Dowling Miss Robertson of Colac (Dolly) 1885–86 oil on canvas 91 x 120 cm

Miss Robertson of Colac (Dolly) 1885–86 is a large and impressive portrait by Australia’s first locally trained artist, Robert Dowling. It conveys Dolly’s sense of shy reserve, as well as her latent sensuousness—with the toe peeping out beneath the dress, the steam rising from the teapot and the flowers in full bloom behind her.

John Jones, the expert on the artist and curator of the Gallery’s Robert Dowling touring retrospective, has written the first major book on the artist, published in conjunction with the exhibition, in which he writes: … this image of a young Miss Robertson of Colac is a refreshing change. The artist must have enjoyed the experience of depicting someone youthful and engaging, after painting so many old and sometimes dead men … The portrait displays a new informality, a feature of Royal Academy portrait exhibits in the 1880s and seen in the work of Dowling’s English contemporaries James Sant (1820–1916), John Dicksee (1817–1905) and James Hayllar (1829–1920).

Dolly, or Elise Christian Margaret Robertson, was the eldest daughter of William and Martha Robertson of The Hill, a property near Colac in Western Victoria. William was a prominent grazier from Colac, active in the Victorian Parliament and public life generally.

Dolly was born in 1866. She spent most of her younger years at the family property and, although she was courted by a number of suitors, her strict father considered none good enough for his daughter, and she never married.

She died in Melbourne in 1939.

Dowling visited The Hill in 1885 and painted three portraits of three generations of Robertsons: one of William Robertson, one of William’s late father (painted from a photograph) and this portrait of Dolly.

At the time of Dowling’s visits to The Hill, William Robertson had recently taken up photography, and his photograph album includes a photograph of Dowling with this portrait of Dolly, taken in 1885, showing her wearing a white dress. Dolly was nineteen at the time. In Melbourne, towards the end of 1885 or early in 1886, Dowling

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re-painted the work as it now exists, with Dolly in a dark brown dress. Family tradition has it that Dolly insisted she be repainted in brown to make her look more grown up.

It has also been proposed that the dress was changed to brown after Dolly’s father rejected one of her most recent and dearly loved suitors. ‘If I am never to marry,’ she is reputed to have stormed ‘then I will be in mourning for the rest of eternity’.

Dowling made a number of other changes in this portrait. He provided welcome comfort by depicting her before a tea table with her favourite Japanese tea service and vanilla slices, holding a book in her right hand.

Her loving black-and-white spotted border collie at her side provides companionship. Previously, her right arm had been outstretched on the side of a garden bench and there was no dog or tea table.

The painting has some similarities with the work of the British artist John Everett Millais, whose jewel-like paintings of the 1850s–80s created a vision of Victorian womanhood, and of the French-British artist James Tissot, who made his reputation with images of charming women. It also makes an interesting comparison with the work of John Longstaff, and in particular his group portrait Motherless 1886, in the National Gallery of Australia’s collection, painted at around the same time. Longstaff created a scene of melodrama and sentimentality, using a sombre brown tonal palette.

While there is an element of wistfulness in Dowling’s portrait of Dolly, there is no sentimentality; and, although Dowling’s palette is limited, it goes far beyond the brown tonality of Longstaff. Thus, while Longstaff is the younger artist, Dowling’s is the more vital work.

We hope that people will be generous so that this portrait of Dolly will be secured for the national collection.

Anne Gray Head of Australian Art For further information about the Masterpieces for the Nation Fund or to make a donation, please contact the Foundation on (02) 6240 6454

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Foundation Foundation gala dinner and weekend The annual fundraising dinner and weekend will be held on 20 and 21 March 2010. Experience a weekend of behind-the-scene tours, a private viewing of the exhibition Masterpieces from Paris: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and beyond and a gala dinner on Saturday evening, as well as brunch at the French Embassy on Sunday. For further information regarding purchasing tickets, please contact Annalisa Millar, Executive Director of the National Gallery of Australia Foundation, on (02) 6240 6691.

Andrew Barr, John Hindmarsh and Ray Wilson at the opening of Masterpieces from Paris, 3 December 2009.

Founding Donors 2010 program Do not miss this rare opportunity to become involved in the Founding Donors 2010 program, which concludes on 30 June 2010. The program aims to raise $1 million by June 2010 through the assistance of 100 donors contributing at least $10 000 each—contributions may be made over two financial years. The funds raised from this program will assist the Gallery to acquire works of art for the national collection to be exhibited in the galleries and displays of the new building.

Undoubtedly, the opening of the original building in 1982 was the most significant event in the Gallery’s history.

At the time, wide support was given by the Founding Donors, whose outstanding contributions continue to be acknowledged by the Gallery. Now, the Founding Donors 2010 program provides a means for today’s supporters to play their part in this new milestone event for the Gallery.

Supporters of the Founding Donors 2010 program will be recognised through the inclusion of their name on the Founding Donors 2010 honour board, which will be placed in the Gallery foyer. In addition, supporters will be invited to a special preview of the new Gallery spaces.

If you are interested in becoming a Founding Donor 2010, please contact Annalisa Millar, Executive Director of the National Gallery of Australia Foundation, on (02) 6240 6691 or annalisa.millar@nga.gov.au.

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Masterpieces for the Nation Masterpieces for the Nation is an annual appeal organised by the Foundation that enables a number of benefactors to donate; their combined donations then make it possible for the Foundation to acquire a work of art for the national collection. Last year was our most successful campaign ever and through the generous assistance of many donors, we acquired Tom Roberts’s magnificent painting Shearing shed, Newstead 1893–94.

The Gallery is delighted to announce that Robert Dowling’s superb portrait Miss Robertson of Colac (Dolly) 1893–94 has been selected for this year’s Masterpieces for the Nation Fund. An article about the work is featured on pages 4–5.

For further details regarding the Masterpieces for the Nation Fund or to donate, please contact the Foundation on (02) 6240 6454.

National Gallery of Australia Bequest Circle A bequest to the National Gallery of Australia is a significant and lasting contribution to the future of the national collection. As, at times, you would have felt captivated, excited, challenged or inspired by a work of art, please consider making a bequest to the National Gallery of Australia. Further information is available at nga.gov.au.

The annual event for the Bequest Circle will be held shortly and you would be most welcome. Please contact Liz Wilson, Development Officer, on (02) 6240 6781.

Sponsorship and Development

Masterpieces from Paris: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and beyond Presented in association with Musée d’Orsay. An exhibition of this scale cannot be realised without the generous support of our partners. We extend our great appreciation to the following organisations: Presenting Partners ACT Government through Australian Capital Tourism, Australian Government through Art Indemnity Australia Principal Partners National Australia Bank, Nine Network Australia, JCDecaux Major Sponsors Qantas, The Yulgilbar Foundation, National Gallery of Australia Council Exhibitions Fund, The Age, The Canberra Times, The Sydney Morning Herald

Supporters ABC Radio, WIN Television, Accor Hospitality (Novotel Canberra), Champagne Pol Roger, Yalumba Wines The gala opening of Masterpieces from Paris was generously sponsored by Ten and a half catering, George P Johnson, Champagne Pol Roger, Yalumba Wines and Coopers Brewery. Their catering and events support provided greatly assisted in making the opening night truly memorable.

Michael Chaney, Chairman, National Australia Bank, Ron Radford, Director, National Gallery of Australia, and John Simpson, Strategic Adviser, Office of the CEO, National Australia Bank, at the opening of Masterpieces from Paris, 3 December 2009.

McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907–17 R.M.Williams, The Bush Outfitter, generously partnered with the Gallery for McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907–17.

This exhibition is currently in Perth at the Art Gallery of Western Australia until 28 March, before travelling to the final venue, the Bendigo Art Gallery, where it will be

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The Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts supports the Gallery through Visions of Australia, an Australian Government program supporting touring exhibitions by providing funding assistance for the development and touring of Australian cultural material across Australia, and through the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian Government and state and territory governments.

Council Circle The Gallery welcomes The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald into the Council Circle. Thanks go to the following Council Circle members for their continued support: National Australia Bank, Wesfarmers, Nine Network Australia, JCDecaux, Qantas, The Yulgilbar Foundation, Accor Hospitality (Novotel Canberra) Champagne Pol Roger, The Canberra Times, WIN Television and Mantra on Northbourne. Our thanks also to long-term supporter The Brassey of Canberra for supplying accommodation for the students who were at the Gallery in January for the National Summer Art Scholarship program in 2010.

National Australia Bank Art Education and Access Partnership As part of its Art Education and Access Partnership, National Australia Bank (NAB) supported the 2010 National Summer Art Scholarship. In January, 16 visual art students starting Year 12 spent a week at the National Gallery of Australia discovering the national collection, learning about how works of art are acquired, exhibitions developed, going behind the scenes to see how the Gallery works and participating in workshops with gallery staff, professional artists and educators. Like the National Gallery of Australia, NAB is passionate about supporting Australian communities and helping young people reach their creative potential. We are grateful to NAB and staff for their generous support and involvement in this important annual art education program.

Fairfax Media’s David Hoath, Sales and Marketing Director, and Ryan Almeida, Sales Development Manager, and Shaun Morgan, Manager, Fairfax 360, at the opening of Masterpieces from Paris, 3 December 2009.

Thérèse Rein with His Excellency Mr Michel Filhol, French Ambassador in Australia.

on display from 24 April to 25 July 2010. We thank the R.M.Williams team for their energy and commitment towards the exhibition. We greatly value the ongoing partnership between our organisations.

We also extend our gratitude to long-term supporter of the Gallery the Hon Mrs Ashley Dawson-Damer as the Exhibition Benefactor for the McCubbin exhibition.

Australian Government Visions of Australia Visions of Australia has provided funding for the National Gallery of Australia’s travelling exhibitions In the Japanese manner: Australian prints 1900–1940, Robert Dowling: Tasmanian son of Empire and Australian street stencils.

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Wesfarmers Arts Indigenous Fellowship Wesfarmers Arts has provided unwavering and enthusiastic support in the consultation and development of the Wesfarmers Arts Indigenous Fellowship. This initiative will reap important and ongoing outcomes to encourage the professional development of Indigenous professionals in the visual arts sector. The partnership represents two iconic Australian organisations committed to the long-term development, training and mentorship of Indigenous people and the Indigenous arts sector. The Wesfarmers Arts Indigenous Fellowship will focus on the professional development of Indigenous people in roles supporting the visual arts such as curatorship, marketing, exhibition management, art handling, registration,

publishing, photography, digital image management and fundraising. This partnership is one that is valued highly by the National Gallery of Australia and we are grateful to Wesfarmers Arts for making it possible.

The National Gallery of Australia is very grateful to the American Friends for their continued and unwavering support of the collection and of many of the Gallery’s exhibitions and programs.

American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia The American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia’s two grants were made possible with the very generous support of important benefactors Elaine and James Wolfensohn KBE, AO, and Dr Lee MacCormick Edwards.

The first grant will go towards the National Gallery of Australia Travelling Exhibitions program for projects developed for improving disability access and remote access.

The second has been put towards publishing the catalogue for the National Gallery of Australia Travelling Exhibition Robert Dowling: Tasmanian son of Empire.

Acknowledgements to Kate Flynn, who resigned as Treasurer from the Board of Directors last November, for her longstanding contribution to the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia. The Gallery looks forward to her continuing friendship and advice as a member of its Advisory Board.

We welcome Murray Regan and Chris Beale as directors of the American Friends as well as Brad Haynes and Francesca Macartney Beale Esq as members of the Advisory Board.

We would like to thank all our partners. If you would like more information about Sponsorship at the National Gallery of Australia, please contact Frances Corkhill on +61 2 6240 6740 or frances.corkhill@nga.gov.au.

For information about Development at the National Gallery of Australia, please contact Belinda Cotton on +61 2 6240 6556 or belinda.cotton@nga.gov.au.

Deborah Eburne and Max Eburne, General Manager, JCDecaux, at the opening of Masterpieces from Paris, 3 December 2009.

National Australia Bank’s Greg Sutherland, Executive General Manager Strategy and Marketing, and Jacinta Carboon, Senior Sponsorship Manager Arts and Community, at the opening of Masterpieces from Paris, 3 December 2009.

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credit lines Includes donations received until 22 January 2010.

Grants The American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia with the very generous support of Elaine and James Wolfensohn KBE, AO, and Dr Lee MacCormick Edwards The Gordon Darling Foundation Australian Government: Masterpieces from Paris has been indemnified by the Commonwealth through the Australian Government’s Art Indemnity Australia program, administered by the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts.

Department of Health and Ageing‘s Dementia Community Grants Program Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts through Visions of Australia, an Australian Government program supporting touring exhibitions by providing funding assistance for the development and touring of Australian cultural material across Australia, and through Art Indemnity Australia, the Australian Government’s art indemnity scheme through which loans to the Masterpieces from Paris exhibition have been indemnified Sponsorship ABC Radio Accor Hospitality (Novotel Canberra) ACT Government (through Australian Capital Tourism) ActewAGL The Age apARTments The Brassey of Canberra The Canberra Times Casella Wines Champagne Pol Roger Coopers Brewery Diamant Hotel Eckersley’s Art & Craft Forrest Hotel and Apartments JCDecaux George P Johnson Mantra on Northbourne National Australia Bank National Gallery of Australia Council Exhibitions Fund

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NewActon Nine Network Australia Qantas R.M.Williams, The Bush Outfitter The Sydney Morning Herald Ten and a half catering Wesfarmers Limited WIN Television Yalumba Wines Yulgilbar Foundation ZOO

Paul and Catherine Morton Peter Blackshaw Real Estate Dick Smith AO and Pip Smith David Smithers AM and Isabel Smithers and family TransACT Communications Dr Caroline Turner AM and Dr Glen Barclay Lyn Williams AM Ray Wilson OAM Kaely and Mike Woods Mark Young

Donations Jane Flecknoe Jason Prowd Peter Webster

Gala dinner Philip Bacon AM Julian and Annie Beaumont Andrew and Kate Buchanan Peter Clemenger AM and Joan Clemenger Charles Curran AC and Eva Curran Rosemary Foot AO Dr Colin Laverty OAM and Elizabeth Laverty Peter Hack and Carole Lawson Peter Mason AM and Kate Mason Roslyn Packer AO Lou Westende OAM and Mandy Thomas-Westende

Gifts John Beard The Hon Ian Callinan AC, QC The Hon Ashley Dawson-Damer Gordon Darling AC, CMG, and Marilyn Darling AC Peter Fay Dr Tom Ferrier Dr Paul Gerber Dr Anna Gray Pamela Griffith William Hamilton bequest of Margaret Louise Jarrett Christopher Langton John McPhee The estate of Andrew Paterson Lynda Scmedding Bruce Searle Ross Searle Philip Toyne Murray Walker Merrilyn Woodland Founding Donors 2010 Geoffrey and Vicki Ainsworth Antoinette, Emily and Anna Albert Robert Albert AO, AM, and Libby Albert AO In memory of John David Andrew OBE David Baffsky AO Julian and Annie Beaumont Alfonso and Julie del Rio Dr Murray Elliott AO and Gillian Elliott Ganter family Dr Gregory Gilbert and Kathleen Gilbert Sue Griffin Neil Hobbs and Karina Harris Meredith Hinchliffe Helen Eager and Christopher Hodges Claudia Hyles Gail Kinsella Beverly and Anthony Knight Hamish Mackinnon

Masterpieces for the Nation 2009 Ross Adamson Margaret Aston Andrew Freeman Joseph Gani Michael and Doris Hobbs Libby Hathorn Members Acquisition Fund Deborah Allen Bill Anderson Margaret E Anderson Quentin and Jan Anthony Isabelle Arnaud Monica Clare Attridge Professor Peter Bailey Dr Lesley Baker Suzanne J Baker-Dekker Estelle and Christopher Barnes Mrs Judith Barnes Helen Barnett Sam and Lois Bateman Maria Bendall Professor Jeff Bennett and Ngaire Bennett Virginia Berger Sheila Bignell Noel Birchall Phoebe Bischoff OAM Robert Blacklow Susan Boden Parsons in memory of Dr Robert Boden OAM Gillian Borger Vera Brain

Cheryl Bridge Margaret and Geoffrey Brennan AW Buckingham Dr and Mrs Miles Burgess John and Judtih Caldwell Rear Admiral David J Campbell Robert and Helen Campbell Stewart and Iris Campbell Daphne Carlson Philomena Carnell Maureen Chan Elaine Colson Graham Cooke Dr Brian Crisp AM Georgia Croker Peter Curtis Henry Dalrymple Kathy Davis JW de B Persse Debby Cramer Research Services Dr Maureen P Dee James Dittmar Stuart Dixon-Smith Helen Douglas Mr and Mrs SB Duffy Katherine Engel Valerie M Farthing-Bennetts Emeritus Professor Frank Fenner AC, CMG, MBE Cherylllee Flanagan Jo-Anne Flatley-Allen Bert Flugelman Ernest Franks Morag Fraser John BR Gale Joseph Gani J Giddens and EA Last Lindsey and David Gilbert Elizabeth Gilchrist LF Gillard Max and Monica Glenn Robert and Moya Gnezdiloff Richard and Maryan Godson Ian and Shirley Gollings Ross Gough Peter J Hack William Hamilton Frank and Pat Harvey In memory of my parents Meg and Bill Pearce Suzanne Herfort Katrina Higgins Marian Hill Janet D Hine Bob Hitchcock Graham C Hobbs Beatrice Margaret Hunt OAM Claudia Hyles

M Ilbery Anthony and Lynette Irwin John and Ros Jackson Lynette James Wayne Joass Judy Johnson Mary Johnson In memory of Garry John Robinson In memory of Ernest Edward and Kathleen Veronica Jones Mrs Jurkiewicz Joan Kennedy in memory of John Grant McCredie D and R Kennemore Sir R Kingsland AO, CBE, DFC, and Lady K Kingsland Lois Michell Harald and Sieglinde Korte Ann Mabel Lancaster Robert Laurie AM and Diana Laurie Judy Laver Dr Colin Laverty OAM and Elizabeth Laverty Marion Rose Lê In memory of Dora Margaret Lewis Dr Frederick and Penelope Lilley Dr Stephen List Audrey and Edward Maher Mr and Mrs AB Maple-Brown Brenda McAvoy Diana McCarthy PF McCormick Selma McLaren Geoffrey and Rhonda Miller Bevan Mitchell John Mitchell Dr John Morris Elizabeth Morrison Janet M Moyle Dr Angus M Muir Joahanne Mulholland and David Rivers RD and A Munro Claude Neumann SP and BM O’Halloran Milton Edgeworth Osborne Luciano Padina and Ingrid Padina Angus and Gwen Paltridge Kim Paterson Marion Platt-Heppworth Ron and Fay Price Anne Prins Wendy Rainbird Ronald B Raines John Ramsay Rear Admiral Max Reed Emeritus Professor Tom Reeve and Mary Jo Reeve W Reid and J Reid Joan Richards

Shirley Richards Lyn Riddett Mary E Riek Janet Roberton Dr Alan Roberts William Robertson Paul and Hanan Robilliard Susan S Rogers Alan and Helen Rose Dr James Ross Roslyn Russell Museum Services Raoul Salpeter Mark and Ruth Sampson Robin Schall Alison Scott Paul and Linda Selzer Kenneth and Audrey Shepherd AD and ML Smith Elizabeth Smith Phyllis Somerville Simone Spano David and Anne Stanley Stefanoff family Spectrum Consultancy Pty Ltd Joy Stewart Ned Storey Susanne Storrier Lady Synnot Jason Thomas Helen Topor Ms Janice C Tynan Dr Nancy Underhill Morna Vellacott Darren Viskaich Rosemary Walsh Helen Watson Madeleine Welsh Guy Werner Murrealia Wheatley John White and Eileen White Mandy White Shelagh Whittleston Julia Wilson Gwen Wilton Tessa and Simon Wooldridge Diana Woollard Micke and Robyn Wright Ron Wright Evelyn and Graham Young Giovanna Zeroni

Treasure a Textile Brian O’Keeffe AO and Bridget O’Keeffe AM

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exhibition

Masterpieces from Paris: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and beyond 4 December 2009 – 5 April 2010 | Exhibition Galleries

‘Certainly, the future for painting is very much in the tropics, in Java or in Martinique, Brazil or Australia, not here …’

Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo van Gogh, 17 June 1890 At the official opening on a delightful summer evening in the National Gallery of Australia’s Sculpture Garden, Thérèse Rein launched Masterpieces from Paris: Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin and beyond. In her speech, she engaged the audience with recollections of her own visit to the Musée d’Orsay as well as talking about several intriguing journeys made by nineteenth-century painters. While Paris, of course, remained the centre for most artists, many travelled extensively, searching for new environs and fresh inspiration.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Masterpieces from Paris is the way the exhibition explores the connections between the artists we now classify as PostImpressionist. Many of these relationships were very close; some, such as that between Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, were taut, combative and highly competitive.

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Relationships were maintained over substantial distances, from different countries, and over extended periods.

Indeed, the wealth of correspondence remaining from this period—when rail transport was widespread and the postal services frequent—is extremely valuable to researchers, not only in Europe but worldwide.

Van Gogh was musing about Gauguin fleeing from Paris—from its increasing industrialisation and its busy, competitive art world—and thought he might even travel to Madagascar, where Gauguin planned an artists’ studio.

But just one month later, on 29 July 1890 in Auvers, where he was living under the care of Dr Gachet, van Gogh died from self-inflicted gunshot wounds. He had never really given up the idea that he and Gauguin might work together again, just as they had for nine intense, tumultuous weeks in Arles.

Van Gogh dreamt of gathering his fellow painters around him in a ‘Studio of the South’ and his plans dominate his letters to Theo, Gauguin and Emile Bernard in 1888. In May, he rented four rooms in a building, the Yellow House, and set up his home with much care. On the upper level were two tiny adjoining bedrooms and it was with great anticipation that he welcomed his friend Gauguin to Arles early in the morning of Tuesday 23 October 1888. Gauguin’s room, entered by passing through van Gogh’s via the door shown at the left in Van Gogh’s bedroom at Arles 1889, was decorated with canvases of sunflowers. Between October 1888 and September 1889, van Gogh drew and painted several views of his own room.

The ‘Studio of the South’ was intended as an alternative, even rival group to the artists gathered around Gauguin at Pont-Aven. Gauguin had travelled to Brittany in July 1886, an existing artists’ colony since the 1860s, searching for somewhere to work and live cheaply as well as a way to consolidate his style. The eighteen-year-old Bernard arrived in Pont-Aven in August that year, having set off from Paris several months earlier on a walking

trip through Normandy and Brittany. On this first visit he found the older artist unresponsive. Two years later, urged on by van Gogh, he again approached Gauguin, and this time the two artists worked side-by-side, developing the Synthetist style of painting. They emphasised an extreme simplification of forms, the expressive purification of colour, large-scale pattern and decorative qualities inspired in part by the local crafts, cloisonné enamel and stained-glass windows.

Gauguin fell in love with Madeleine Bernard—portrayed by her brother in Madeleine in the Bois d’Amour 1888—and sent her the ‘primitive’ ceramic shown in his painting Portrait of the artist with ‘The yellow Christ’ 1890–91. Madeleine, for her part, preferred the younger, more romantic Charles Laval, Gauguin’s companion on his 1887 trip to Panama. Later, however, the relationship between Bernard and Gauguin soured, as Bernard increasingly felt that his role in the development of Synthetism was being ignored. Madeleine, on the eve of Gauguin’s 1891 departure for Tahiti, accused him of being a traitor: ‘… you have broken your pledge and done the

Masterpieces from Paris, room 4: Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School/ToulouseLautrec: (from left to right) Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Woman with a black boa 1892 and The clown Cha-U-Kao 1895; Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian women 1891, Portrait of the artist with ‘The yellow Christ’ 1890–91, Les Alyscamps 1888 and Yellow haystacks (The golden harvest) 1889; Charles Laval’s Landscape 1889–90; Gauguin’s Seascape with cow (At the edge of the cliff) 1888; Emile Bernard’s The harvest (Breton landscape) 1888 and Bathers with red cow 1887. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’ The poor fisherman 1881 is visible in the next room.

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Emile Bernard Madeleine in the Bois d’Amour or Portrait of my sister 1888 oil on canvas 138 x 163 cm Musée d’Orsay, Paris, purchased 1977 © RMN (Musée d’Orsay)/ Hervé Lewandowski © Emile Bernard. ADAGP/ Licensed by Viscopy, 2009 Paul Sérusier The talisman, the Aven at the Bois d’Amour 1888 oil on wood panel 27 x 21.5 cm Musée d’Orsay, Paris, purchased with assistance from PM Through Fondation Lutèce, 1985 © RMN (Musée d’Orsay)/ Hervé Lewandowski

greatest harm to my brother, who is the real initiator of the art that you claim as being your own’.

In April 1891, Gauguin sailed from Marseilles to Tahiti, his plans for a ‘Studio of the Tropics’ in Madagascar having come to nothing. In his first months on the island, he painted the magnificent Tahitian women 1891. En route, the steamer Océanien docked in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. Shortly after leaving Australia, some 400 kilometres from Sydney, Gauguin described his experiences to his wife Mette in a letter of 4 May 1891: Many calls on the way. The last two were truly astonishing, Melbourne and Sydney. Imagine two towns hardly 50 years old, of 500 000 inhabitants, with houses of 12 storeys, steam trams and cabs as in London. The same smart clothes and abounding luxury. Fancy coming 12 000 miles to see that! At Sydney a dock labourer earns 20 to 25 francs a day and meat costs 4 sous a pound. It is very easy to earn money in Australia, but even on 25 000 francs a year, you can only live very modestly. In spite of all these caustic remarks, I am obliged to admit that the English people have truly extraordinary gifts for colonising and running up great ports. A burlesque of the grandiose!

Paul Cézanne also fled Paris, but for quite different reasons.

His contributions to the Impressionist exhibitions of 1874 and 1877 were singled out for particularly harsh criticism,

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and he was increasingly isolated from the art world after 1886. In Aix-en-Provence, he repeatedly painted the dramatic limestone peak of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Ever the painter’s painter, Cézanne’s work was well known and much respected by other artists. In Homage to Cézanne 1900, Maurice Denis shows himself and his contemporaries admiring a still-life by Cézanne, while, elsewhere, Cézanne records his own tribute to the great nineteenth-century painter Eugène Delacroix.

In Paris, Georges Seurat developed a ‘scientific’ approach to painting: his monumental A Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte 1884–86 stole the show when included in the final Impressionist exhibition of 1886, and gathered him admirers further afield when seen in Belgium the following year. Established artists such as Camille Pissarro and Maximilien Luce also came under the spell of Pointillism. Paul Signac expanded Seurat’s ideas even further, especially when he moved to the south of France in 1892, where he used larger dots of saturated colour and his technique became freer.

Another of Gauguin’s encounters launched a new group of artists. Paul Sérusier arrived in Pont-Aven in September 1888, and the painting he produced there under the guidance of Gauguin, The talisman, the Aven

at the Bois d’Amour 1888, proved a revelation to his fellow students back in Paris. Calling themselves the Nabis, this group of young artists gathered as a secret society, influenced by idealist philosophies and Symbolist literature.

They took Gauguin’s lessons in the use of unmodulated colour and the simplification of forms, and emphasised art not as an imitation of reality but as an expression of the artist’s subjective, even interior experience. Painting, according to the Nabis, should move beyond the easel to become part of the architecture, to become pure décoration. Masterpieces from Paris includes tiny, painted, jewel-like vignettes of everyday life, as well as large-scale panels commissioned for specific domestic interiors, muted palettes and fresco-like surfaces.

In Masterpieces from Paris, works by Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Félix Vallotton and Edouard Vuillard are juxtaposed against those of older Symbolists painters such as Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau and Odlion Redon to suggest the range of influences on the Nabis. Sérusier shows Paul Ranson elaborately costumed in mystical garb, while Bonnard’s portrait of Vuillard is shaped to fit in an architectural setting, perhaps around a chimney. Vuillard painted his brother-in-law Roussel, his friend Vallotton, sleeping figures or children playing in the public gardens, watched over by their nannies and the ladies who converse on park benches.

Two women named Marthe—Denis’s wife and Bonnard’s life-long companion—are painted over and over again: at the piano, as muses, or as a luxuriously reclining nude.

Post-Impressionism, as an umbrella term, provides a useful way of understanding the complexity of the art world at the end of the nineteenth century. Movements such as Pointillism, Synthetism and Symbolism developed from this intricate web of friendships, exchange and rivalry.

Post-Impressionism also suggests the ways artists built on, and reacted against, the Impressionist painters.

As well as famous painters like van Gogh, Cézanne and Gauguin and groups such as the Nabis and the School of Pont-Aven, Masterpieces from Paris includes marvellous works by individuals such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Henri Rousseau. We experience pure colour, great handling of paint and a certain exoticism; we discover the reduction of forms to their simplest components: the surface of the water becomes an arabesque, an apple becomes a circle.

Masterpieces from Paris shows how these artists’ radical experiments in Paris and elsewhere are the basis of Modern art in the twentieth century.

Lucina Ward Curator, International Painting and Sculpture The book Masterpieces from Paris, published in conjunction with the exhibition, is available at the Gallery Shop for $39.95 and at selected bookstores nationally for RRP $49.95.

Edouard Vuillard In bed 1891 oil on canvas 73 x 92.5 cm Musée d’Orsay, Paris, verbal bequest of Edouard Vuillard executed by Mr and Mrs KerXavier Roussel, 1941 © RMN (Musée d’Orsay)/ Hervé Lewandowski © Edouard Vuillard. ADAGP/ Licensed by Viscopy, 2009

Pierre Bonnard Woman dozing on a bed (Indolent woman) 1899 oil on canvas 96 x 106 cm Musée d’Orsay, Paris purchased ex Félix Fénéon collection, 1947 © RMN (Musée d’Orsay)/ Thierry Le Mage © Pierre Bonnard. ADAGP/ Licensed by Viscopy, 2009

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display

New look National Gallery of Australia

Southeast Asian gallery at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

November 2009 was an important moment for the National Gallery of Australia and the end of a four-year journey to relocate and refurbish most of the Gallery’s collection displays. In addition to our earlier relocation of the Indian, Southeast Asian and refurbished East Asian displays, the realignment and refurbishment of our International Modernist galleries and the re-established and restored National Australia Bank Sculpture Gallery, we recently opened eight new displays, most of them made possible by the relocation of the Gallery Shop.

In my vision statement of 2005, which can be viewed on the Gallery’s website, I wrote about how vital a collection and its display are to any national gallery in the world. Indeed, a gallery’s permanent collection is, and must remain, the core focus of the institution. For this reason, the highest standards have been set for the acquisition, conservation, protection, interpretation and of course, relevant here, the display of the collection.

Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo. We also show some of our significant traditional Asian costumes. The costume displays are complemented by a new large showcase to permanently display highlights from the National Gallery of Australia’s extensive Australian and international jewellery collection.

The Gallery is also breaking new ground by dedicating an entire gallery (be it small) to the art of Polynesia, the first in Australia. Immediately upstairs above it is a gallery devoted to our larger collection of Melanesian art. These regions have been underrepresented for so long in Australian art museums. We have a small but very high-quality collection of art from our neighbouring Polynesian nations and islands, including Maori New Zealand, the Cook Islands, Marquesas Islands, Fiji and the Austral Islands. This is also important as there are so many Polynesian people now living in Australia. The Polynesian gallery takes the place of the small Childrens Gallery. Earlier

In Australian art, we have changed many of the spaces and wall arrangements and used historic wall colours for nineteenth-century works. We have also finished restoring, partitioning and re-lighting gallery 3 on the main entry level, which is now used again for contemporary international art, bringing our international collection displays to the present day.

Our most popular and famous Australian work, Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series, always deserved a specially designed space and now the series is among the first works you see when you enter the National Gallery of Australia on the principle display level. They are now in a newly created oval space. The Australian furniture designer Khai Liew has designed two refined ottomans especially for the space.

The upstairs space in the Australian galleries where the Ned Kelly series used to hang is now devoted to Australian Surrealist works, the Gallery having been given, fairly recently, the large Agapitos/Wilson collection of Australian Surrealism.

In the area where the Gallery Shop once was, we also opened our first permanent space for the art of photography, which has long been a significant part of the collection, made more significant by the recent extensive acquisitions of early Asian and Pacific photography. Our first photography display in this new space is the gift by the eminent photographer John Gollings of his own striking iconic New Guinea series of the early 1970s.

Also in this space, we have new showcases dedicated to decorative arts that highlight aspects of the Gallery’s collection of twentieth-century fashion by some of the field’s leading designers. The first display focuses on the work of three of the most influential figures in fashion in the late twentieth century: Japanese designers Issey Miyake,

this year, we opened a bigger Childrens Gallery upstairs, more conveniently located near the Small Theatre, where events and activities for children can be held. Directly above the Polynesian gallery is our new display of Melanesian art, which includes such treasures as the enigmatic Ambum stone, the oldest object in the national collection. This and our Lake Sentani figures are our most significant Pacific Arts works. In this small gallery we feature works from Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia.

These refurbished spaces now allow the Gallery to show an extra 400 works, a significant increase from the 1000 works for which the Gallery was originally designed to show. It is a momentous achievement for all involved and I would like to express my appreciation to our own staff and contractors for their great efforts and whose great professionalism, teamwork and camaraderie have helped realise, in four short years, the vision for the Gallery’s collections.

In addition to these new displays, as part of our Stage 1 building project, this time last year, we opened vitally needed new spaces for registration, mount cutting, exhibition preparation, quarantine, packing, a new art loading dock and a new goods loading dock, and other essential behind-the-scenes functions.

Noticeably absent from these new displays is the presence of our significant collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. This will only be temporary. When the new building opens later this year, we will have ten new Indigenous galleries for the dedicated display of the world’s largest collection of Indigenous Australian art.

Ron Radford AM Director

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Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly paintings Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly paintings are among the first works that visitors now encounter when they visit the National Gallery of Australia. The recently opened, oval space on the entry level was specially constructed to display these iconic paintings—some of our most significant Australian works—to best advantage and to make them easily accessible to local and international visitors alike.

Highlighting these works makes the point that Australian art is part of the world, with its own stories to tell. This dual emphasis of connectedness and distinctiveness in relation to culture and place is integral to Nolan’s Ned Kelly series. On one hand, Nolan was keenly aware of European Modernism; on the other, he tapped into a quintessential local legend: the escapades of the anti-authoritarian nineteenth-century bushranger, Ned Kelly, and his gang. While Nolan’s paintings are by no means literal, blow-by-blow depictions of the story, the group is held together by key aspects of the drama and by the now iconic imagery Nolan developed for Ned Kelly.

Centred in the new gallery space is Nolan’s classic image of Ned Kelly wearing his armour and seated on his

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horse in the open sun-drenched landscape. As Nolan said in a conversation with Elwyn Lynn in 1984, ‘This is Kelly the defiant. I put Kelly on top of the horse in a particularly orderly manner. I wanted an air of perfect authority, so the cloud appears through the aperture of the mask’. One of the distinguishing aspects of Ned Kelly was his feel for symbolism. His homemade armour, now housed in the State Library of Victoria, concealed and transformed his image. It became his image. It is this idea that Nolan captures brilliantly. One of the astonishing things about the painting Ned Kelly is that we believe in Nolan’s Ned, even though he has an aperture in place of eyes. This poetic transformation is symbolic not only in terms of Kelly as an individual but also in the way it unites him with the environment.

The landscape is often the backdrop for Nolan’s take on the stories and conflicts of a settler society that in turn reflect broader concerns. He understood the human condition as profound and absurd. He grasped the tension between the hero and anti-hero in Kelly and recognised Kelly as a distinctly Australian symbol of anti-

authoritarianism and anti-convention with a keen eye for history—attitudes mirrored in aspects of his own life and personality. While Ned Kelly is ultimately centre-stage in this story, Nolan’s approach is not one-dimensional. His own grandfather was a member of the police in pursuit of the Kelly Gang and he depicts the tribulations of the various protagonists. As we take in the final scenes, including the trial when the young Ned Kelly was sentenced to hang, we find tragedy and defiance.

Taking an overview of the Kelly paintings on display, we can marvel at the inventiveness of the imagery and the way the works are painted: the boldness of forms and landscape; the intricacy of patterning; the way the shiny, dense surface of the enamel matches the stark, unflinching bravura of execution and imagination. In doing so, we come to realise that this new gallery space provides a wonderful new arena for reconsidering Nolan’s Ned Kelly works, for appreciating the interrelated drama of the paintings and for contemplating our stories afresh.

(from left to right) Sidney Nolan’s Constable Fitzpatrick and Kate Kelly 1946, Morning camp 1947, Township 1947, Steve Hart dressed as a girl 1947, Quilting the armour 1947, Death of Constable Scanlon 1946, Stringybark Creek 1947 and Death of Sergeant Kennedy at Stringybark Creek 1946 in the Sidney Nolan – Ned Kelly series gallery near the main foyer of the National Gallery of Australia.

Deborah Hart Senior Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture post-1920

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Photography The National Gallery of Australia’s photographic art collection, comprising 25 000 Australian and international photographs, acquired since collecting began in 1972, is the most extensive in Australia. It includes works dating back to the beginning of photography in the 1840s, and major names and developments in the history of the medium as an art form are well represented.

Australian, European and American photographs dominated the acquisition program until 2006, when a new vision for the collection was introduced recognising Australia’s position in the Asia–Pacific region. The first phase of this new program, the first in the world to show the history of photography as an art across the Asia–Pacific region, has significantly expanded the Gallery’s photography collection by over 8000 works.

Since 2006, special efforts have been made to acquire works from the first century of photography in the Asia– Pacific region, from the 1840s to the 1940s. Significant works by the first generation of Australian photographers of the 1840s and 1850s have been acquired, including

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daguerreotypes from 1847 and 1848 by Douglas Kilburn in Victoria and Thomas Bock in Tasmania, which are among the earliest portrait photographs made in Australia. The pioneer generation of Asian-born photographers from the mid to late nineteenth century—such as Francis Chit of Thailand, Kassian Cépahs of Indonesia, Kusakabe Kimbei of Japan and Lala Deen Dayal of India—are now well represented in the national collection. Works by photographers of the twentieth century have also been sought after so that studies by Sri Lankan Modernist Lionel Wendt in the 1930s join the well-known works of his Australian and American contemporaries Max Dupain and Edward Weston.

What has been lacking until now is a space in which to show the Gallery’s Australian, European and American photography, as well as the more recently acquired works that reveal the rich heritage of photography in the Asia– Pacific region.

The first display in the new Photography gallery is of a selection of large colour prints by Melbourne photographer

John Gollings from his New Guinea suite 1973–74, which acquired in 2008 under the Australian Government Cultural Gifts Program. Gollings is best known for his photographs of contemporary Australian architecture and of the ancient monuments of Southeast Asia. His interest in ancient cultures came early in his career, following trips made in 1973 and 1974 to Papua New Guinea, where he stayed with villagers in Mt Hagen in the Western Highlands, Goroka in the Eastern Highlands and Morobe on the northeast coast. During his time there, he photographed the tribal dance performances known as ‘sing-sings’. While Gollings has researched Papuan culture, these photographs are not anthropological records. He used wide-angle and telephoto lenses and special processing to heighten colour and background effects and to give viewers a sense of being there.

John Gollings’s New Guinea suite is the first display in the Photography gallery. (opposite) John Gollings Mt Hagen (woman having her face painted for a sing sing) fromNew Guinea suite 1973–74 colour ink jet photograph on Hahnemuhle photo rag paper image 59.6 x 84.4 cm sheet 61 x 93.9 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra gift of John Gollings, 2008

Gael Newton Senior Curator, Photography

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Asian costume The new showcases near the Gallery foyer provide an opportunity to display the Gallery’s diverse collection of Asian costume and accessories for which there has never been a suitable space to exhibit in three-dimensional form.

The costumes in the national collection are drawn from many cultural locations across a wide geographic region.

For the initial displays, costumes from Central, South and Southeast Asia have been selected to illustrate the breadth of the Gallery’s Asian art collection. Together the garments, each distinct and beautiful in its own way, reveal the great variety in forms of dress and adornment to be found across the region.

Recently the Gallery acquired its first items of royal costume from Pakistan. The Talpur Mirs who ruled Sindh, a province in southern Pakistan from 1783 to 1843, were famous for their sumptuous court apparel. Under the dynasty’s patronage, the arts and crafts flourished and royal workshops, particularly in the important court centre of Hyderabad, produced fine cottons, silks and brocades for extravagant royal attire. A rare complete court ensemble worn by a nobleman for ceremonies and public receptions

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at the Talpur Mir courts is on display. The costume comprises a very ornate robe (angarakha), waist wrap (lungi), trousers (shalwars) and hat (topi). The combination of bright bold colours and gold threads in the brocades and embroideries evokes the splendour of South Asian royal attire in the nineteenth century.

The Gallery’s significant collection of costume from Central Asia is characterised by boldly coloured dramatic designs.

A key element of the traditional dress of Tekke Turkmen women of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan is the chyrpy, a loose-fitting cloak worn over the head and shoulders. A unique feature of the chyrpy is the purely decorative vestigial sleeves that hark back to an earlier use by Turkmen women of coats and robes as head coverings. The art of embroidery suited the nomadic lifestyle of the Turkmen peoples and was their dominant textile technique. The motifs embroidered on the cloaks range from geometric shapes to stylised flowering shrubs, simple tree of life forms and tulips (often associated with fertility). The colour of a chyrpy is closely related to the age of the wearer: dark blue or black for young women, yellow for a mature woman and white for the elderly.

Drawn from the Gallery’s world-class collection of Indonesian textiles are examples of traditional ceremonial costume from Lampung, south Sumatra. There, Abung noblewomen wear heavily ornamented cylindrical skirts (tapis) as symbols of wealth and high status at ceremonies that celebrate rites of passage. Such skirts, typically formed from narrow bands of striped hand-woven cloth in muted colours, are sumptuously embroidered with gold threads, sequins and mirrors. Geometric designs and stylised ships, animals and human forms decorate the surfaces. The small creatures on one of the skirts appear to represent water buffaloes—a symbol of wealth.

The garments in the new showcases mark the beginning of rotating displays that aim to reveal the diversity of costume in Asia, and to demonstrate the complex textile techniques used to create sophisticated and culturally significant forms of dress.

Showcases displaying (from left to right) costumes from Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Indonesia.

Talpur Mir dynasty (1783–1843) Hyderabad, Sindh, Pakistan Nobleman’s ceremonial hat (sindhi topi) early–mid 19th century silk, cotton, gold and silver thread, sequins; embroidery 13 x 25 x 25 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased 2009

Tekke Turkmen people Uzbekistan Woman’s mantle (chyrpy) 1950–1960 rayon, silk, cotton lining, braid, fringing; embroidery 110 x 64 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased 2008

Beatrice Thompson Assistant Curator, Asian Art

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Fashion The selection of fashion on display in five large showcases highlights aspects of the National Gallery of Australia’s extensive collection of late-nineteenth- and twentiethcentury fashion and textiles by some of the field’s leading designers and couturiers. Their work reflects wider social change and shows how fashion has interconnected with other arts as an expressive, challenging and entertaining form of contemporary design practice.

Responding to advances in textile technology and manufacturing processes, twentieth-century European, American, Japanese and Australian designers have been innovators in fashion’s core disciplines of cutting, tailoring and construction and in the commissioning, management and orchestration of craftworkers and technicians in areas such as textile printing, embroidery and beading. Selections of their work will be supported by displays of fashion illustration and accessories such as costume jewellery, shoes and hats.

The current display focuses on the work of three of the most influential figures in fashion of the late twentieth

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century: Japanese designers Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo. Six garments from the 1980s and 1990s show their radical approach to design for the body.

Rei Kawakubo created her brand name Comme des Garçons in 1969 through which she revolutionised concepts of fashion. By the late 1970s, and by then well known in Europe as part of a group of avant-garde Japanese fashion designers, her radical designs for crumpled, torn and asymmetrically-shaped garments in black and sombre tones and coarse materials gained acceptance in the fashion world. Her designs for women’s and men’s clothing and accessories shared these concepts and were translated into more marketable ready-to-wear ranges.

Yohji Yamamoto’s first fashion collection, shown in Japan in 1976, established his unique approach to design based on loose, unstructured and asymmetrical elements.

Avoiding decoration and using coarse, textured and dark materials not previously associated with high fashion, Yamamoto crafted a radically different clothing aesthetic

that blended abstraction, asceticism and modesty with technological modernity.

Issey Miyake established his Miyake Design Studio in 1970 and showed his first collection in New York in 1971. His design work revolutionised fashion through his unconventional construction techniques, production processes and use of materials. Tightly pleated fabrics used in myriad forms have become a specialty of the design work for his Pleats Please brand. Miyake has created a new language of fashion that fuses Eastern and Western design, drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as African tribal design, Japanese origami and vernacular clothing, industrial work wear and the organic forms of nature.

Dr Robert Bell Senior Curator, Decorative Arts and Design

Fashion display, including (from left to right) Yohji Yamamoto’s Spring/Summer outfit 1986, Issey Miyake’s Minaret, dress spring–summer 1995 (purchased 1995 with funds donated by Eva and Marc Besen through the Besen Charitable Foundation) and Plastic body, bustier 1980, and the design collaboration between Issey Miyake and Yasumasa Morimura, Dress from Pleats Please Issey Miyake Guest artists series no 1 autumn–winter 1996–97 (gift of Issey Miyake and Yasumasa Morimura, 1997). (opposite) Rei Kawakubo designer Comme des Garçons manufacturer Ensemble 1983 wool centre back 68 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased 1983 with funds donated

by Eva and Marc Besen through the Besen Charitable Foundation

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Jewellery Jewellery forms a significant part of the Gallery’s Decorative Arts and Design collection, with 565 Australian and 65 international works demonstrating the design and craft skills of Australia’s and the world’s most innovative jewellers. The first display in a sweeping new jewellery showcase is a selection of 108 pieces of historical and contemporary jewellery from the mid nineteenth century to the present. This group introduces Gallery visitors to a part of the collection that until now has had little regular exposure.

The works on display show the result of the changing creative engagement with materials and with the human body as a site and point of reference. While intimate in scale, these works command our attention through their unconventional approaches to form and function and the sometimes surprising juxtaposition of materials. Many of the works celebrate the visual qualities of rare and precious materials and the exercise of traditional skills such as silvermithing and goldsmithing, forging, casting, carving and stone setting that form the foundation of the jeweller’s craft. Other works demonstrate the

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use of newer technologies, such as computer-aided design and production and the innovative exploration and manipulation of industrial and synthetic materials, continually extending the practice and understanding of jewellery.

Gallery visitors will see how these practices have allowed some jewellers to explore themes of environmental and social narrative, history, memory, intimacy and humour, while other jewellers explore structure, assemblage and the expressions of colour and texture to create new territories of thought and design.

Highlights of the current display include selections of Australian gold and silver jewellery from the late nineteenth and early and mid twentieth centuries by makers such as Henry Steiner, Jochim Wendt, Charles Brown, James Linton, Dorothy Wager, Emily Hope and Matcham Skipper. These works form a historical context for a number of large and complex works from the inventive Australian crafts revival period of the 1970s and 1980s.

Recent works by contemporary Australian jewellers have expanded the conceptual framework, including those

by Marian Hosking, Mari Funaki, Bridie Lander, Helen Aitken-Kuhnen, Margaret West, Sally Marsland and Dulcie Greeno. Among the contemporary New Zealand jewellery on display are works by Warwick Freeman, Alan Preston, Paul Annear and Hamish Campbell, revealing their strong commitment to the use of indigenous materials.

Late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century European jewellery is represented with works by the Italian firm of Castellani, William Comyns from Britain and the Danish designers Georg Jensen and Henning Koppel. Major works from 1980 to the present by some of the world’s most influential contemporary jewellers—Arline Fisch, Robert Smit, Giovanni Corvaja, Giampaolo Babetto, David Watkins, Wendy Ramshaw, Georg Dobler, Daniel Kruger, David Freda, Peter Chang, Hermann Jünger, Tone Vigeland, Svenja John, Nel Linssen, Gerd Rothmann—show how the traditions and conventions of jewellery are continually being interrogated and transformed though complex narratives and explorations of material and form.

Jewellery gallery, highlighting works by the world’s finest designers.

Dr Robert Bell Senior Curator, Decorative Arts and Design

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased 2009 with funds from the Meredith Hinchliffe Fund

Wendy Ramshaw White Queen’s neckpiece 1975 18 carat yellow gold, sapphires, moonstone, agate, amethysts and white vitreous enamel 25 x 14.8 x 0.6 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased 1979

Hermann Jünger Boxed necklace with four interchangeable pendants c 1990 stainless steel, tombac, silver, lapis lazuli, haematite, granite, brass, lacquered medium density fibreboard case 1 x 15 x 15 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra gift of American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia, Inc, New York, NY, USA, made possible with the generous support of Helen Drutt English, 2005

Helen Aitken-Kuhnen Ocean blue (necklace) 2009 sterling silver, cast glass pâte-deverre, stainless steel circumference 65 cm

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Polynesian art In a first for Australia, the National Gallery of Australia has opened a gallery dedicated to the art of Polynesia. The first display in this new space will go beyond considering Polynesian art as purely anthropological objects to showcasing them in the context of world-class art. From the Gallery’s small but very fine collection of works from the nineteenth century or earlier, 22 of the most interesting Polynesian pieces have been selected. These are complemented with eight contemporary prints by John Pule, Patrice Kaikilekofe and Shane Cotton from the Australia Pacific Print collection.

The display is dominated by intricately carved Maori objects and includes works from New Zealand, Fiji, the Cook Islands, the Marquesas Islands, Hawai‘i and the Austral Islands. Some of the older objects in this first display were used in rituals—the newly acquired Fijian bulutoko sanctified fork for instance (see p 45)—or were imbued with spirit beings or gods (atua)—which may be the case for the eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Maori war canoe figure that stands at the entrance to the gallery.

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A number of visitors to the Gallery have already experienced a presence that is much greater than the figure’s physical size. But perhaps this presence is a trick of light reflecting off the surface of the work. Whatever the case, it is undoubtedly the work of a master carver.

A more recent figure attributed to the gifted Maori carver Raharuhi Rukupo, who died in 1873, stands alone on a plinth at the end of the gallery. This pensive character stands with his head bent in respect, his hands clutching his chest, his tattooed body braced to support the weight of the post which once soared above his head. He has strength and dignity, balance and poise and a powerful ethereal presence.

Other superbly carved objects populate the long display case. Works of art from a number of different regions highlight the cultural and artistic practices that many Polynesian islands share, despite the distance between them. The most meaningful group is dominated by a deeply carved, long, horizontal panel of the type generally known to the Maori as paepae, which means ‘threshold’—as in

‘threshold to another world’. Underneath this is a group of three lively hei tiki, almost dancing in their bright green nephrite, and two whalebone clubs.

The Maori treasure box is itself a treasure. The Hawaiian necklace (lei niho palaoa), the paddle from the Austral Islands, the no’oanga (seat for a noble) from the Cook Islands and the fan from Marquesas Islands are all finely crafted, world-class works of art. The Maori cloak, which stands apart in its own showcase is exquisite in its detail and has the unique feature of three taaniko decorative borders—most cloaks of this kind only have two. The cloak is very delicate so, to keep it on display for as long possible, while preserving it, a timer to control the light has been installed.

The contemporary prints are also exquisite in their detail but they depict a very different side of Polynesia, a side that is more intellectual, more pensive, more questioning. These are the images of Polynesia today.

Polynesian gallery, including (from left to right) Poutokomanawa (attributed to the 19th-century carver Raharuhi Rukupo), a central door panel c 1885, a Maori cloak and a showcase of objects from various Polynesian peoples. (opposite) Maori people, Aotearoa New Zealand Canoe guardian (huaki) 17th– 18th century totara pine, ochre 43.5 x 49.5 x 46.4 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased 1978

Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia Fan (tahi’i) 1800–1850 wood, pandanus, coconut fibre 38 x 30 x 2 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased 1972

Dr Michael Gunn Senior Curator, Pacific Arts

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Melanesian art The National Gallery of Australia fulfilled one of its longterm aims when it opened this gallery space solely for the display of Melanesian. By doing so, the Gallery has distinguished itself among the world’s art museums, only a few of which have similar focused displays.

Melanesia covers the nations of Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia and Papua New Guinea, and the arts from the region have been considered a priority for the national collection since 1966. To describe concisely the traditional arts of Melanesian communities is difficult as there are at least 400 distinctive art traditions on the Island of New Guinea alone; however, there are a number of commonalities.

Many of the works in the Pacific arts collection are connected in someway to religious and social activities.

Some works were quite literally the abodes of spirits, ghosts and ancestors. Masks of bark cloth and carved wood were danced to great effect and sculptures of impressive size were revealed to audiences in elaborate ceremonies designed to build up the a very real anticipation

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that one was in the presence of entities from other realms.

Often, the idea behind these works was to leave a lifelong impression on the viewer, so there is great care taken to create works that can seize and hold your gaze. Some visitors to the Melanesian gallery may feel certain works still posses a resonance or energy of a spiritual nature, which is not entirely unexpected.

The Double figure from Lake Sentani exudes a particular calmness, or perhaps an empathic serenity, in its gentleness of form and the physical stances of the couple. Quite the opposite, the Spirit mask from the lower Sepik River has an air of malevolent foreboding befitting its purpose as the carved face of a spirit capable of inflicting great illness to those who did not give it the appropriate respect.

The majority of works in the Melanesian gallery were made for indigenous use, even the colossal disc-eyed treefern figure Mague ni hirwir, which was created only a few years ago to celebrate the successes of a chief on the Island of Ambyrm in Vanuatu. Only one sculpture on display was not created for indigenous use, The drummer. It is the work

of the artist known as Mutuaga, the only identified artist active in Papua New Guinea during the nineteenth century whose body of work is known. Mutuaga was a master carver of the highest order. He carved possibly the earliest ‘souvenir’ arts in Papua New Guinea for visiting Westerners, and his work can now been found across the world in important museum and gallery collections.

The National Gallery of Australia’s collection of Melanesian art is quite large at around 1700 works. Now that there is a dedicated gallery for Melanesian arts, the display will periodically change to ensure audiences have the opportunity to see as many of these works as possible.

Crispin Howarth Curator, Pacific Arts

Melanesian gallery, featuring (from left to right) Mogulapan c 1600–1900, a spirithouse post from the 1950s–60s, a prehistoric mortar, a 20th-century decoration for a ridge pole, Gilbert Bantor’s grade figure and a centrepost for a ceremonial house.

Kapriman people Chambri Lakes area, East Sepik province, Papua New Guinea Female figure 1850–1950 wood, fibre, pigment, patina 70 x 16 x 10 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2008

Mutuaga The drummer ebony, lime 36.5 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2009

Iatmul people Tambanum village, East Sepik River, Papua New Guinea Gable mask from a Haus Tambaran cane, sago leaf fibre, pigment 124 x 100 x 50 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased 2008

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Australian Surrealism André Breton, the great French Surrealist thinker, famously remarked, ‘The marvellous is always beautiful.’

For Breton, the idea of the marvellous related to dreams and imaginings that could be grotesque, erotic, visceral, or confronting. For European Surrealists the imaginative possibilities of the mind were endlessly fascinating, transcending fixed notions of beauty. The pre-eminent Australian Surrealist, James Gleeson, concurred. In 1940, he wrote in Art and Australia: ‘The theory of Surrealism is based upon a belief that the logical mind, with its prescribed formulas of thought, is incapable of expressing the entire range of human experience and aspiration’.

Some of Gleeson’s major paintings are on display in a dramatic new space dedicated to Australian Surrealism.

This space has been made possible by the perspicacity and generosity of Ray Wilson OAM and the late James Agapitos OAM. Since 1990 they focused on acquiring works from the Surrealist movement, homing in on well-known and lesser-known artists to amass a particularly fine collection of paintings, drawings, photography, collage, sculpture and prints. After more than 15 years, they made the momentous decision for the majority of their collection to 32 national gallery of australia

come to the National Gallery of Australia. Agapitos and Wilson had carefully considered the new home for their collection. They had been excited by the Surrealism by night exhibition held here in 1993 and by the accompanying catalogue. Their collection was truly national in scope, corresponding with the aim of the national collection. They were also mindful of the ways in which their collection would complement the Gallery’s important holdings of international Surrealism to make this the foremost Surrealist collection in Australia, drawing the attention of local and international visitors, curators and scholars.

While the Gallery already had a very strong collection of Australian art from the 1940s, there were significant gaps in Surrealism. It was also recognised that works from the Agapitos/Wilson collection would correspond brilliantly with some Surrealist works already in the Gallery’s collection. This integration is evident in the current display.

For instance, powerful works by Gleeson such as Neoorganic figuration describing entities 1939 and Spain 1951 work well with the Gallery’s earlier acquisition The citadel 1945. Many works from the Agapitos/Wilson collection dramatically strengthen and deepen our holdings, including

paintings, drawings and collages by Sidney Nolan and highly evocative photographs by Max Dupain.

While some artists, such as Dupain, Nolan, Albert Tucker and John Perceval drew upon Surrealism sporadically for specific subjects; others, such as Gleeson and Dušan Marek, remained committed Surrealists throughout their artistic lives. Marek is an artist who deserves to be much better known. While his works are often intimate in scale, they are among the treasures of the Surrealist collection.

Taking an overview of all the works on display in the new Gallery confirms Breton’s idea of the power of the fantastic or the ‘marvellous’, transporting us from the ordinary to the extraordinary and unveiling a surreal feast of visual and psychological possibilities.

Australian Surrealism gallery, highlighting works

by James Gleeson on the far wall (right), Inge King on the plinth nearest the far wall, Dusan Marek on the plinth in the foreground and Herbert McClintock, Jeffrey Smart, Hein Heckroth, Douglas Roberts, Sydney Nolan, John Perceval and Albert Tucker.

Deborah Hart Senior Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture post-1920

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exhibitions and displays

Robert Dowling: Tasmanian son of Empire A travelling retrospective of Australia’s first home-grown artist

Robert Dowling Tasmanian Aborigines 1856–57 oil on canvas 63.6 x 118.6 cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne purchased 1949

Robert Dowling Egyptian banana seller 1878 watercolour with bodycolour over graphite on paper on board 71.7 x 50.7 cm private collection

Robert Dowling was Australia’s first major colonial-trained professional artist. Within Australian art historical terms, this was a milestone of great significance. It may seem surprising, then, that the National Gallery of Australia travelling exhibition Robert Dowling: Tasmanian son of Empire is the first retrospective of the artist’s comprehensive body of work. This exhibition shows his portraits, including his portraits of pastoralists and their properties, portraits and compositions of Indigenous people, biblical subjects, social history subjects and his Oriental subjects.

The exhibition opens on 6 March at the Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery in Launceston, Tasmania, where Dowling arrived in Australia in 1834 at the age of seven.

Dowling gave up his saddlery trade to launch himself as a professional portrait painter in Launceston in 1850. It was still pre-gold rush Australia, and our first locally formed professional painter emerged at the age of 23. Dowling made claims of being self-taught but, despite the fact that the colonies had no academies of art for formal training or public art collections to study, the young artist had opportunities to learn from other colonial artists, including Frederick Strange and Thomas Bock, and from the work of Henry Mundy.

In Tasmania, a balanced colonial microcosm of late-Georgian English culture supported sophisticated

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architecture, furniture makers, silversmiths, frame makers and, importantly for Dowling, a surprising number of portrait painters—as well as still-life, marine and landscape painters. Indeed, Tasmanian art from the 1830s to the early 1850s was richer and more diverse than that of any other Australian colony.

Dowling’s interesting early portrait oils and miniatures executed in Tasmania appear superficially sophisticated, yet their often oversized heads and undersized hands betray the fact that he was deprived of the benefits of academic training and life drawing. Even so, his understanding of modelling and use of colour at this early stage of his professional career and his grasp on the character of his subjects was already more advanced than that of many of his colonial forebears and contemporaries.

John Jones curated the exhibition and is the author of the accompanying book published by the National Gallery of Australia. The book is the first dedicated to the work of this central and critical figure in late colonial art. Jones delves into Dowling’s early career in Tasmania (1850–54), his time in Victoria (1854–57), his London years (1857–84), and his return to Victoria (Melbourne) (1884–86) before he died back in London in 1886. He is now placed highly as Australia’s major portrait and figure painter of the late colonial period of around 1850–85.

The exhibition has been sponsored by the National Gallery of Australia Council Exhibitions Fund, which is based upon generous personal donations from members of the Gallery Council made for the particular purpose of sponsoring special exhibitions. The publication has been generously sponsored by the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia Inc, New York, with the special support of Dr Lee MacCormick Edwards.

The exhibition also has generous support from the Federal Government’s Visions of Australia and the National Collecting Institutions Touring and Outreach Program.

I sincerely thank these funding bodies.

Ron Radford AM Director Excerpt from the introduction to the book Robert Dowling: Tasmanian son of Empire, published in conjunction with a major travelling retrospective and available at the Gallery and exhibition venues for $39.95 and at selected bookstores nationally for $49.95.

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acquisition

Miyuki: the imperial outing and hunt

Momoyama period (1573–1615), Japan Miyuki: the imperial outing and hunt 1600–10 (details) pair of six-fold screens (rokkyoku byobu), colour and gold on paper 168 x 366 cm (each) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased with the generous assistance of Andrew and Hiroko Gwinnett, 2009

The Gallery has recently acquired a spectacular pair of sixfold screens (rokkyoku byobu) inspired by an episode of the classic Japanese novel Tale of Genji. Created in the early seventeenth century, their subject matter attests to the enduring popularity of the court epic and the great skill of Momoyama-period artists.

Genji Monogatari or Tale of Genji was written in the early eleventh century, at the height of the Heian period (794–1185), by a noblewoman known as Murasaki Shikibu. Although scholars disagree on the details of Lady Murasaki’s real identity (such as her first name), she was born into the powerful Fujiwara family in the late tenth century and became a lady-in-waiting to Empress Akiko.

Tale of Genji, often referred to as the world’s first novel,

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is widely considered a masterpiece of Japanese literature.

Its narrative centres on the talented and extraordinarily attractive aristocrat Genji, son of an emperor, and several generations of his family. While Genji is a fictional character, Lady Murasaki’s tale was likely based on real people and events. Her text conjures up the atmosphere of Heian court life, particularly the great appreciation of the arts, beauty and courtly refinement for which the period is renowned. Divided into 54 chapters, the novel relates court events, complex social relationships, love affairs, scandals and political intrigues. Heian-period courtiers, the author’s contemporaries, eagerly sought instalments of the novel as they were written. Images from the tale became an important theme in Japanese art and were

Momoyama period (1573–1615), Japan Miyuki: the imperial outing and hunt 1600–10 pair of six-fold screens (rokkyoku byobu), colour and gold on paper 168 x 366 cm (each) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased with the generous assistance of Andrew and Hiroko Gwinnett, 2009

especially prevalent in the later Momoyama period (1573–1615).

The Gallery’s screens illustrate Miyuki: the imperial outing and hunt, chapter 29 of the epic tale, and capture the rich pageantry of Japanese court life. The magnificent procession that appears on the left screen is a royal hunting party travelling from the Imperial palace to visit a shrine at Oharano, west of old Kyoto. The emperor, Genji’s illegitimate son, is hidden from public view inside a bullock-drawn carriage. As the excursion was a major official and social court event, the emperor is accompanied by an impressive entourage of mounted guards, servants and costumed courtiers. Dressed in white, a group of attendants carry large parasols to unfurl on arrival in

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Oharano. A crowd of children, farmers, samurai and aristocratic men and women has gathered to enjoy the colourful spectacle. In contrast to the stately procession, the right screen shows the chaos of the hunt. Falconers, men on horseback, and courtiers in ornate dress pursue deer, pheasants and wild boar across an atmospheric landscape.

While Tale of Genji describes an earlier time, the scene presented on this pair of screens is set in the seventeenth century. Despite the temporal shift, the painting retains much of the essence of Murasaki’s novel, particularly in terms of an overall sense of elegance, and attention to the details of ceremonial events and personal adornment.

All the characters are in exquisite Momoyama-period

dress, with textile designs and hairstyles represented in stunning detail. The blossoming cherry trees are another embellishment to the original story, reflecting the growing popularity of cherry blossom viewing in seventeenthcentury Japan.

In the Momoyama period, painted screens were generally commissioned by wealthy patrons and designed to appeal to individual interests and social position. The creator of this painting was likely an artist of Japan’s celebrated Kano school, which was established in the sixteenth century and thrived for over 300 years. Kano paintings are characterised by sweeping abstracted natural settings, detailed depictions of figures and animals, and the use of gold leaf. Here, the extensive gilding and embossing

of the clouds gives the landscape a luminous quality.

Purchased with the assistance of Andrew and Hiroko Gwinnett, generous supporters of Japanese art in Australia, Miyuki: the imperial outing and hunt enhances the Gallery’s small but fine collection of Japanese screens. It is currently on display in the gallery of East Asian Art. Lucie Folan Curator, Asian Art

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acquisition

Thomas Bock Portrait of two boys

Thomas Bock Portrait of two boys 1848–50 daguerreotype plate 7 x 6 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased 2009

The first commercially available photographic portraits in the 1840s were daguerreotypes. By the mid 1850s, a wide range of middleclass sitters across the world could have a high-quality image—often beautifully hand-coloured—of themselves and their loved ones. These images were especially poignant in distant European colonial societies where settlers might rarely or never again see their families.

The daguerreotype was first demonstrated in Australia in Sydney in May 1841. Late the following year, London’s George Goodman set up the first commercial studio in

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Sydney, claiming to have an exclusive license to use the daguerreotype in the colonies. Goodman was working in Hobart in August 1843, where he came in direct competition with British convict artist Thomas Bock.

Although an engraver by trade, Bock had a keen interest in photography and, in the Hobart Town Advertiser of 29 September 1843, he advertised that ‘in a short time he would be enabled to take photographic likenesses in the first style of the art’. Infuriated, Goodman threatened legal action and Bock promptly withdrew until five years later when he opened a portrait photography studio in Hobart.

Bock’s stepson Alfred assisted him in the photographyside of the studio business. They had seen daguerreotype portraits brought from London by Reverend Francis Russell Nixon in Hobart in June 1843—before Goodman’s arrival in Tasmania—and had purchased a camera from a Frenchman in Hobart so that they could learn the new art form using photographic formulas published in English magazines.

Their lack of proper training, however, shows in Hobart dignitary GTYB Boyes’s records of August 1849, in which he comments, ‘Bock understands the nature of his apparatus but very imperfectly!’ Despite this and other unfavourable remarks between 1849 and 1853, Boyes continued to visit Bock’s studios for daguerreotype portraits.

Bock’s portrait of two freckle-faced boys dressed in matching outfits shows that he was a skilled photographer by 1848—a year before Boyes’s initial disparaging remark.

Any parent would have been thrilled by such a vivid image of their sons, especially as, like many colonial sons, they might be getting ready to be sent ‘home’ to the United Kingdom for schooling. The image of the boys was a memento for their parents as well as proof for relatives in Britain that colonial society could produce the same well-dressed and well-bred young boys as the old country.

The sitters are as yet unidentified but the daguerreotype has been dated by comparison with several identified examples of double portraits of children that have survived out of the hundreds of images made by the Bock studio.

Gael Newton Senior Curator, Photography

acquisition

Portrait of three Californian goldminers

Americans embraced the daguerreotype from its first appearance in New York in the early 1840s and, in the West in particular, hundreds of thousands of daguerreotypes were made in California during the peak gold rush years of 1849 to 1864. This output was far greater in number, quality and variety of examples than for any other place in the Asia–Pacific region.

The first generation of miners in California, known as 49ers, created a particular style of occupational portrait in which they were portrayed in confident, even swaggering poses—wearing their working gear of wool over-shirts, buckskin trousers, bandannas and special miners buckles.

The miners were often shown holding their tools, pans, gold nuggets, pistols and knives. Many miners portraits were made outdoors on the diggings.

The example, recently acquired by the National Gallery of Australia, is identifiable as a miners portrait by the buckles and shirts. However, it is distinctive because of the male camaraderie or brotherly affection that is shown.

Double or triple portraits were cheaper but it is perhaps that desire to show their bond that made these three burly young men have their collective likenesses taken. Their hair is longish, a practical choice on the fields but this also imparts a rather romantic air to the young men. The image is both very attractive and of a high level of clarity and brightness.

Possession of such an image became a badge of fraternity among the miners or an essential proof of wellbeing and success to send back home. The genre was so popular that photography studios began supplying clothes for tourists to have their pictures taken as ‘miners’.

No similar genre of miners daguerreotypes is known in Australia—or even any single identified miners portrait.

Gael Newton Senior Curator, Photography

Photographer unknown not titled (portrait of three Californian gold miners) 1/4 plate daguerreotype plate 10.6 x 8.1 cm case 11.7 x 95 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased 2009

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acquisition

Philip Wolfhagen Autumn equinox; the loss of the sun

Philip Wolfhagen Autumn equinox; the loss of the sun 2009 oil and beeswax on canvas 200.4 x 160.3 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased 2009

Philip Wolfhagen is widely regarded as one of Australia’s most significant contemporary landscape painters. He won the prestigious Wynne Prize in 2007 and is part of a new generation of painters who are presenting fresh visions of the Australian landscape and rethinking the traditions of this age-old genre. His works, inspired by the atmospheric landscape of northern Tasmania, explore the representation of time and natural phenomena.

Autumn equinox; the loss of the sun 2009 is an outstanding and powerful work from his latest series. It highlights Wolfhagen’s skill and sensitivity in rendering the subtleties and emotive qualities of light, mood and texture. During a fleeting moment of mid-autumn twilight, Wolfhagen has captured the view over a darkened domestic garden and beyond into a farmed landscape.

The large trees in the foreground are silhouetted against the cloudless sky—a velvety, glowing surface of cool blue and the fading remnants of a golden sunset. Wolfhagen’s characteristic combination of oil paint and beeswax creates a luscious surface and adds a physical quality to the work.

The spindly branches of the largest tree are scored into this surface, to reveal a charcoal-coloured, darker underlayer. There is a sense of both melancholy and romance in the title and tonality of this landscape; a scene infinitely suspended between night and day, during the short passage of time when both are roughly equal in length, and on the verge of the colder darker months of winter.

Wolfhagen draws inspiration from the regions surrounding his home in northern Tasmania, many of which he has known since childhood. For example, the domestic garden in the foreground of Autumn equinox; the loss of the sun is the artist’s own and the trees all planted by his hand. However, rather than painting en plein air, Wolfhagen works primarily in the studio from photographs and from what he identifies as an ‘imagined or partly remembered space’. He begins to paint after contemplating and absorbing his observations and emotional responses to a certain landscape. In this regard, his works simultaneously embody and transcend a specific place.

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Across the darkened paddock depicted in Autumn equinox; the loss of the sun, our eyes are drawn to the glimmer of a fire and wisps of smoke—a suggestion of distant human activity. In his 2005 monograph on the artist, Peter Timms states that Wolfhagen is one of few contemporary Australian painters to explore ideas of the picturesque within the cultivated landscape, despite there being little romance left in rural toil. Wolfhagen’s atmospheric explorations of this subject are underpinned by a love of both the wild and changed landscape and, most significantly, a strong sense of our responsibilities towards the natural world.

This work is on a scale just large enough to envelope our vision and provokes an immediate reaction from the senses. We are momentarily transported from the gallery by the illusion of realism. Yet, the sense of profound mystery this work also possesses gives us the impression that Wolfhagen is seeking to draw us further beyond the realm of the physical world. On close inspection, the initial illusion is dissolved and abstracted by the exquisite painterly quality of Wolfhagen’s mark making.

Autumn equinox; the loss of the sun is an important new work by this prominent Australian painter. It is a superb addition to the National Gallery of Australia’s collection of recent landscape painting and to our representation of contemporary Tasmanian artists.

Miriam Kelly Assistant Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture

acquisition

Murray Griffin Self-portrait

Murray Griffin Self-portrait 1932 linocut, printed in black ink from one block, on paper 21.5 x 16.5 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased 2009

Murray Griffin’s early linocut Self-portrait 1932 captures the confident, debonair attitude of the artist through a distinctly modern articulation of classical form and Art Deco stylistic devices. Griffin was an innovative printmaker, painter, teacher and active member of the Melbourne art community for over four decades. He first experimented

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with different printing techniques in the 1920s and soon focused on the linocut process as it was simpler than woodcut, with the lino easier to use and more obtainable.

In 1932, Griffin produced two self-portraits, the first of which was a forceful direct frontal portrayal. The second, Self-portrait, is a three-quarter profile reminiscent of the glamorous photographic studio portraits of the 1920s and 1930s. The print explores a range of tonal techniques, with the definition of the artist’s cheekbones emerging from the stippled surface of shadow, while delicate crosshatching is employed to indicate the contours of the face.

The artist has picked out sweeps of hair in sinuous curved lines and uses strong hatching on the casually upturned collar. The un-inked background creates a luminous halo effect, hinting at later works that were deeply influenced by his anthroposophical beliefs based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner. Griffin was more approving of this second representation, having destroyed all but one impression of the first.

Born in Melbourne on 11 November 1903, Griffin studied drawing from 1919 to 1920 and painting from 1921 to 1922 at the National Gallery School. His first experiments with linocuts were in 1921, but these did not reach fruition until the early 1930s, when he learnt the process of multiple-block colour printing from Napier Waller. It is possible Self-portrait was made under the direction of Waller as studies such as this were often set as student exercises. During this time, Griffin also became familiar with Japanese woodblocks through exhibitions held in Melbourne, the collection of American architect Walter Burley Griffin and the work of Austrian printmaker Norbetine Bresslern-Roth, who had a decisive effect on his later work.

Though Griffin is primarily known for his luminous, glossy-inked colour prints of birds and animals, Self-portrait is an accomplished and engaging work that shows the vitality of line and attention to detail so celebrated in his linocuts.

Emma Colton Assistant Curator, Australian Prints and Drawings

acquisition

Fiji A priest’s fork

This newly acquired Fijian priest’s fork represents the zenith of the carver’s art in pre-European contact Fiji. The sleek, ergonomically designed handle has a flared pommel and ringed section with floral-like decoration before expanding out to three gracefully elongated tines. The artist has shown consummate skill in making each tine elegantly twist along its length. Typical of the finest Polynesian arts, the priest’s fork balances form and function perfectly. Its squid-like appearance and glass-like patinated surface (from many years of use) lend an understated attraction that transcends a mere utilitarian nature. However, behind the beauty of this object lies a macabre purpose.

While forks such as these were notoriously known as ‘cannibal forks’, this unflattering epithet is misleading and obscures their true purpose. Before the mid 1870s, cannibalism was an accepted, normal part of Fijian life, but certain rituals were exclusive. Only priests, for instance, used these forks and only during the ritual consumption of meat, which was not always human flesh, to honour the gods and to act as their medium, receiving their wisdom and instruction. Priests, literally, became the mouthpieces of the gods. Records also indicate that an attendant might be employed to carefully place morsels of food into the priest’s mouth without touching his lips, as even the priest’s lips were sacred.

The fork dates to at least the first quarter of the 1800s as it looks to be carved without the use of iron tools. Also, the undulating zigzag patterns, reminiscent of a snake in motion, may represent female tattooing common in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The production and use of these forks declined from the 1850s to 1876, when a British punitive campaign brought colonial administration to every part of Fiji. Only a dearth of indigenous cultural knowledge regarding these objects survived the mass transition to Christianity; the accounts of early travellers, such as whalers, sandalwood traders and missionaries, are all that remain to provide insight (however Euro-centric) into the pre-Christian arts of Fiji.

This work sits superbly among the other fascinating objects in the Gallery’s new dedicated space for Polynesian art.

Fiji A priest’s fork (bulutoko) early 1800s wood 48 cm, 3 cm (diam) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased 2009

Crispin Howarth Curator, Pacific Arts

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faces in view 1

The Hon Peter Garrett, Minister for the Arts in the Sidney Nolan – Ned Kelly series gallery at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 26 November 2009.

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National Summer Art Scholar Kenna Reid-Clark reveals his print at a special workshop on the 13 January 2010 at the School of Art, Australian National University, Canberra.

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Artist Peter Vandermark discusses his work and process with National Summer Art Scholars at his studio, 14 January 2010.

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Guest enjoying the celebrations at the opening of Masterpieces from Paris, 3 December 2009:

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Mark Muller and Caroline Mills with Maurice Denis’s The Muses 1893 in the exhibition space.

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Johnnie Walker, Michael Desmond and Gene Sherman enjoy the Champagne Pol Roger in the Sculture Garden.

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Melissa Moss, Maurice Reilly, John McKay, Allan Williams and Jessica Wright.

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Michael Chaney and Avi Rebera.

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Roger and Helen Allnutt.

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Adelina La Vita, Kim Giddings, Helen Curzon and Jo Verden.

travelling exhibitions program

Art and about with the Wolfensohn Gift suitcases The cases brought a world of ‘treasure’ to students up here in the remote regions of WA and the students looked on in absolute wonder. Many students would never see such objects ever again, especially those [objects] from other parts of the globe.

Helen Capsalis, art teacher, St Mary’s College, Broome, WA

Students at St Mary’s College in Broome, Rhiannon, Emily and Kheshan discover the works of art in the Red and Yellow cases of the Wolfensohn Gift, 2009.

In early February 2009, the Gallery packed its Elaine and Jim Wolfensohn Gift of art-filled suitcases—Red case: myths and rituals and Yellow case: form, space and design—for a six-month trip to the northern parts of Western Australia.

The suitcases covered a mighty 10 229 kilometres and were enthusiastically received by over 2740 children from schools and centres in Broome, Derby and Kununurra. It was the first time that the gifts have travelled to this part of Australia.

Over the same period the Blue case: technology had a different emphasis. Its tour focused on students and adults living with a disability and commenced with a six-week program at the Royal Institute for the Deaf and Blind in Sydney. Julie Kaney, Director at Rockie Woofit Preschool, which is part of the Institute, commented that the case ‘… provided an opportunity for our children to view sculptures from an art gallery—this was a first for many of our children … it was a wonderful experience for our sensory disability children as well as our community children’. The tour continued south to the Victorian College of the Deaf and to Arts Access Victoria, both in Melbourne, where

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trainers used the case as part of extension activities for adults living with a disability.

The Elaine and Jim Wolfensohn Gift, which comprises three suitcases and the 1888 Melbourne Cup, is an important outreach initiative and an integral part of the National Gallery of Australia’s Travelling Exhibitions program. Generously supported by the Wolfensohns since 1990, the gifts have travelled to most parts of Australia and to a wide variety of venues, from single-teacher schools to large metropolitan art galleries. They have also travelled to places as far afield as Thursday Island, Norfolk Island and to Washington in the United States.

In 2010, the focus of the tour shifts to central Australia as all three suitcases travel through South Australia and on to Alice Springs. Once again, children and adults from all backgrounds will have the chance to engage meaningfully in their local galleries, community centres and classrooms with museum-quality works of art from the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

Mary-Lou Nugent Project Officer, Travelling Exhibitions

Travelling exhibitions autumn 2010

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Exhibition venues and dates may be subject to change. Please contact the Gallery or venue before your visit.

For more information on travelling exhibitions, telephone (02) 6240 6525 or send an email to travex@nga.gov.au.

McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907–17

Frederick McCubbin The old slip, Williamstown 1915

Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, WA, 11 December 2009 – 29 March

private collection

2010 Bendigo Art Gallery, Bendigo, Vic, 24 April – 25 July 2010 Discover Frederick McCubbin’s rarely displayed later works and experience his striking use of colour in the first McCubbin exhibition to be held in almost 20 years.

See this iconic Australian artist in a new light as he depicted a modern Australia in cityscapes, sea views, landscapes and portraits. nga.gov.auy/mccubbin Proudly sponsored by R.M.Williams, Exhibition Benefactor the Hon Mrs Ashley Dawson-Damer and Media Partner ABC Local Radio.

Robert Dowling: Tasmanian son of Empire

Robert Dowling Mrs Adolphus Sceales with Black Jimmie on Merrang Station 1855–56

Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, Launceston, Tas, 6 March – 25 April 2010 Geelong Gallery, Geelong, Vic, 8 May – 11 July 2010

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased from the Founding Donor Fund 1984

Robert Dowling holds a special place in the history of Australian art. He was the first artist to be trained in Australia and was renowned for his paintings of pastoralists and their properties, Indigenous people and biblical themes. This is the first major exhibition of his oeuvre, including his much-lauded oriental subjects. nga.gov.au The National Gallery of Australia acknowledges funding support from the Australian Government through the National Collecting Institutions Touring and Outreach program. Also supported by Visions of Australia, an Australian Government program supporting touring exhibitions by providing funding assistance for the development and touring of Australian cultural material across Australia, and by the National Gallery of Australia Council Exhibitions Fund.

In the Japanese manner: Australian prints 1900–1940

Paul Haefliger Sublime Point above Bulli 1936

Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, Booragul, NSW, 18 June – 1 August 2010

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra gift of the artist, 1978

This exhibition presents a rare opportunity to observe how Australian artists adapted the Japanese woodblock technique printing of ukiyo-e to form a distinctly Australian aesthetic. It features works by Paul Haefliger, Margaret Preston, Thea Proctor, Ethel Spowers, Lionel Lindsay and many other important Australian artist. nga.gov.au Supported by Visions of Australia, an Australian Government program supporting touring exhibitions by providing funding assistance for the development and touring of Australian cultural material across Australia.

Also proudly supported by Hindmarsh.

The Elaine and Jim Wolfensohn Gift The Elaine and Jim Wolfensohn Gift enables people from all around Australia to discover and handle treasured objects. Made possible by Jim Wolfensohn, the gift comprises three art-filled suitcases and the 1888 Melbourne Cup. The Gallery has been touring the Wolfensohn Gifts to schools, libraries, community centres, regional galleries and nursing homes since 1990.

Blue suitcase: technology Country Arts SA, Mount Gambier, SA, 3–31 March 2010 Mount Gambier Public Library, Mount Gambier, SA, 1–19 April 2010 Millicent Art Gallery, Millicent, SA, 20 April – 27 May 2010 Adelaide Festival Centre, Adelaide, SA, 28 May – 5 July 2010 Red suitcase: myths and rituals and Yellow suitcase: form, space and design Arts Access Victoria, Melbourne, Vic, 15 February – 13 April 2010 Disability Information and Resource Centre, Adelaide, SA, 14 April – 14 May 2010 Adelaide Festival Centre, Adelaide, SA, 14–24 May 2010 Country Arts SA, Port Lincoln, SA, 25 May – 25 June 2010 1888 Melbourne Cup Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, Tas, 6 March – 8 April 2010 Burnie Regional Art Gallery, Burnie, Tas, 8 April – 12 May 2010 Devonport Regional Gallery, Devonport, Tas, 12 May – 19 July 2010 Sri Lanka Seated Ganesha 9th–10th century, in Red suitcase: myths and rituals, The Elaine and Jim Wolfensohn Gift

ABC Local Radio is the proud Media Partner of the National Gallery of Australia’s Travelling Exhibitions program. artonview autumn 2010

49

education program

Mandala workshops in rural schools

A colourful mandala created by students at Weethalle Primary.

Ardlethan Central School students form a cirle around their mandala

Education is a key part of the National Gallery of Australia’s role within the national community. Every year, Gallery educators and volunteers conduct seminars, workshops, lectures, tours, training sessions and special study days.

These programs aim to connect people in meaningful ways with the national collection and, more generally, with the creative potential that art brings to everyday life. In 2009, the Gallery supported a grant for two of its educators to conduct visual art workshops for school children in the drought-affected West Wyalong region.

Jo Krabman and I arrived at the beginning of November into a sun-scorched landscape to conduct art workshops at Weethalle Primary and Ardlethan Central School. Weethalle is a small community on the Mid Western Highway and their primary school, from kindergarten to year 6, has only 41 children. The nearby town of Ardlethan has a larger school with 87 students from kindergarten to year 12.

Inspired by works of art which respond to the natural environment such as Buddhist sand mandalas and Land art, the idea behind the workshops was to promote a sense of community. The students collaborated to produce a large, ephemeral work of art made to represent the land in which they live. Students collected a range of natural materials to produce a mandala-style work of art.

50 national gallery of australia

At both schools, students worked in groups to design the rings for their mandala, which consisted of grains, seeds, earth, grasses, hay, red peppercorns, leaves and flowers. As part of the workshops, students were encouraged to produce their own visual and written responses—drawings, collages, mini mandalas, poems and prose—to the materials they had selected for their mandalas. The use of local materials helped students to connect with and express their feelings about their local landscape and their relationships to it.

At the end of the workshop, students gathered to discuss the finished work of art and were inspired by the variety of colours and textures. At Weethalle, a five-year-old excitedly exclaimed, ‘Awesome!’, while an older student interpreted the design as a vast Australian landscape, from the rainforest to the dry countryside and crops. The students had remarkable insight into what it meant for them to create and place these visually stunning mandalas in the context of their own environment.

This education initiative continued the ongoing relationship that the National Gallery of Australia has fostered over the last five years with the drought-effected rural community of the West Wyalong region.

Lucy Quinn Education Officer

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The Visions of Australia Program is administered by the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts.

Acknowledgements (clockwise from top left): Maringka Baker Anmangunga 2006 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas 136.5 x 202.5 cm. Courtesy of Art Gallery of South Australia.

Featured in Culture Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial developed and toured by the National Gallery of Australia. © Maringka Baker | Mavis Ganambarr Basket 2006 (detail) Pandanus fibre, natural dyes, fibre string 48 x 38.2 cm (diameter). Photo: Peter Eve | Belinda Winkler Swell Slipcast ceramic vessels, dimensions variable. Photo: Phil Kuruvita | The Ngurrara Canvas painted by Ngurrara artists and claimants coordinated by Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency, May 1997, 10 x 8 m | Anne Zahalka The Bathers 1989 type C photograph 74 x 90 cm ART12.1209

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artonview ISSUE 61 • AUTUMN 2010 N AT I O N A L G A L L E R Y O F AUSTRALIA

6 March – 25 April 2010 Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, Launceston, Tas 8 May – 11 July 2010 Geelong Gallery, Geelong, Vic 24 July – 3 October 2010 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT Media Partner

National Collecting Institutions Touring & Outreach Program

National Gallery of Australia Council Exhibitions Fund

The National Gallery of Australia is an Australian Government Agency

Robert Dowling Mrs Adolphus Sceales with Black Jimmie on Merrang Station 1855–56, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased from the Founding Donor Fund, 1984