M. Napier Waller 1893-1972
Free entry
NGV International
Ground Level
28 Jul 77 – 28 Aug 77
Napier Waller grew up on a farm south of the Grampians, which he worked on from the age of fourteen. When he turned twenty, he followed his interest in art to Melbourne and studied at the National Gallery School from 1913. He exhibited at the Victorian Artists’ Society in 1915 then served in France during the First World War, where he was wounded and had to have his right arm amputated at the shoulder. He learnt to work with this left hand, first on small drawings and watercolours and later on large-scale mosaics and murals that can still be seen on some of Melbourne’s key buildings from the Art Deco era, when he was in huge demand for public commissions.
This major exhibition took place five years after his death in 1972 and featured sixty works, including large murals, mosaics and stained-glass works that were displayed alongside smaller prints and drawings in the NGV’s famed Featherstone display cabinets.
Works by Waller in the NGV Collection are still popular with visitors today, particularly Virgil, 1922, and The Amazons, c. 1924, which are both regularly displayed.