Curatorial

Australian Art to 1980

The Australian Art collection documents the history and development of painting, sculpture, decorative arts and design in Australia from European settlement to 1980. It charts the work of major artists of the colonial and postcolonial period, as well as the broader sociohistorical and cultural contexts that have shaped Australian art history.

Curators

David Hurlston
Senior Curator, Australian Art

Angela Hesson
Curator, Australian Art

Beckett Rozentals
Curator, Australian Art

Sophie Gerhard
Assistant Curator, Australian Art

Subscribe to NGV eNews

Subscribe

Collection Highlights

Henry BURN
Swanston Street from the Bridge
 1861 Eugene von GUÉRARD
Mr Clark's Station, Deep Creek, near Keilor
 1867 Louis BUVELOT
Waterpool at Coleraine
 1871 John RUSSELL
Peonies and head of a woman
 (c. 1887) Tom ROBERTS
Shearing the rams
 1890 Bertram MACKENNAL
Circe
 1893 Arthur STREETON
'The purple noon's transparent might'
 1896 Frederick McCUBBIN
The pioneer
 1904 Rupert BUNNY
Endormies
 (c. 1904) George W. LAMBERT
A sergeant of the Light Horse
 1920 Grace Cossington SMITH
The Bridge in-curve
 (1930) Lina BRYANS
The babe is wise
 (1940) Sidney NOLAN
Footballer
 (1946) John BRACK
Collins St, 5p.m.
 1955 Jeffrey SMART
Cahill Expressway
 (1962) Fred WILLIAMS
Red landscape
 (1981)

Watch

NGV’s Australian Silver Collection Decorative emu eggs Margaret Worth’s Fragment 9 A colour field painter Grace Crowley’s Girl with goats With Beckett Rozentals, Curator of Australian Painting, Sculpture & Decorative Arts to 1980 Baldessin/Whiteley: Parallel Visions Sasha Grishin, Wendy Whiteley & Tess Edwards-Baldessin Baldessin’s Pears George Baldessin The Field Revisited The Field is recreated fifty years on

Read

What is in a title? Dick Watkins’s Rain in West Pymble

By Raymonda Rajkowski

 Fragile beauty: emu eggs in early Australian gold and silverware

By Marika Strohschnieder

 Beneath the surface: X-rays reveal a different story

By Raye Collins and Carl Villis

 La Petite, Evening Dress

By Danielle Whitfield, Susan van Wyk and Bronwyn Cosgrove

Art Journal

Robert Jacks Temple gate

By Beckett Rozentals

 H. Newman & Sons, Melbourne The Buller Presentation Flask

By David Hurlston

 Thomas Woolner Farquhar Cole

By Beckett Rozentals

 ‘Majestic Michael rises’: Clarkson Stanfield’s Mount Saint Michael, Cornwall, 1830

By Rebecca Edwards