Treasures of a Decade

Treasures of a Decade was a celebration of the first ten years of collecting since the NGV moved from its original home in the State Library of Victoria building to its current site on St Kilda Road. The scope of the collection had already outgrown what the new building could hold, as Director Eric Rowlison noted in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue:

‘An exhibition of generous scope which included all works that the curators and Trustees felt to be significant would have overfilled the Temporary Exhibitions gallery and ceased to be an exhibition at all, becoming instead a compendium of the permanent collection galleries’.

Rowlison credited much of the growth to the Felton Bequest, which he credited with funding more of the works in the exhibition than any other source.

Artists featured included Australians Fred Williams, Elizabeth Gower and Thomas Clark and European masters such as Stefano Di Giovanni, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Turner, Renoir, Goya, Jean Arp and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as photography, sculpture and decorative arts from across the globe.