The National Gallery of Australia (NGA), formerly the Australian National Gallery, is the national art museum of Australia as well as one of the largest art museums in Australia, holding more than 166,000 works of art. Located in Canberra in the Australian Capital Territory, it was established in 1967 by the Australian Government as a national public art museum. As of 2022 it is under the directorship of Nick Mitzevich.
The Archibald Prize is an Australian portraiture art prize for painting, generally seen as the most prestigious portrait prize in Australia. It was first awarded in 1921 after the receipt of a bequest from J. F. Archibald, the editor of The Bulletin who died in 1919. It is administered by the trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and awarded for "the best portrait, preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in Art, Letters, Science or Politics, painted by an artist resident in Australia during the twelve months preceding the date fixed by the trustees for sending in the pictures". The Archibald Prize has been awarded annually since 1921 and since July 2015 the prize has been AU$100,000.
Australian art is any art made in or about Australia, or by Australians overseas, from prehistoric times to the present. This includes Aboriginal, Colonial, Landscape, Atelier, early-twentieth-century painters, print makers, photographers, and sculptors influenced by European modernism, Contemporary art. The visual arts have a long history in Australia, with evidence of Aboriginal art dating back at least 30,000 years. Australia has produced many notable artists of both Western and Indigenous Australian schools, including the late-19th-century Heidelberg School plein air painters, the Antipodeans, the Central Australian Hermannsburg School watercolourists, the Western Desert Art Movement and coeval examples of well-known High modernism and Postmodern art.
John Henry Olsen AO OBE is an Australian artist and winner of the 2005 Archibald Prize. Olsen's primary subject of work is landscape.
The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), founded as the New South Wales Academy of Art in 1872 and known as the National Art Gallery of New South Wales between 1883 and 1958, is located in The Domain, Sydney, Australia. It is the most important public gallery in Sydney and one of the largest in Australia.
Sali Herman was a Swiss-born Australian artist, one of Australia's Official War Artists for the Second World War.
Elioth Lauritz Leganyer Gruner was an Australian artist.
John Beard is a Welsh artist and painter born in Aberdare, Wales, now based in Sydney, Lisbon and London.
George Feather Lawrence (1901–1981) was born in Sydney, Australia and for many years was regarded as one of the foremost painters in the impressionist style. He studied under Julian Rossi Ashton at the famous Sydney Art School in the old Queen Victoria Building; and later in London and Paris.
Adrian George Feint was an Australian artist. He worked in various media, and is noted for his bookplate designs.
Margel Ina Harris Hinder was an Australian-American modernist sculptor, noted for her kinetic and public sculptural works. Her sculptures are found outside the Australian Reserve Bank building in Martin Place, Sydney, in a memorial in Newcastle, New South Wales, and in Canberra, ACT. Her work is held in several Australian public collections.
Jean Bellette was an Australian artist. Born in Tasmania, she was educated in Hobart and at Julian Ashton's art school in Sydney, where one of her teachers was Thea Proctor. In London she studied under painters Bernard Meninsky and Mark Gertler.
Across the Black Soil Plains is a 1899 painting by Australian artist George Washington Lambert. The landscape depicts a team of draft horses pulling a wagon heavily laden with wool bales. Lambert's painting was awarded the Wynne Prize in 1899.
Aida Tomescu is a Romanian and Australian contemporary artist who is known for her abstract paintings, collages, drawings and prints. Tomescu is a winner of the Dobell Prize for Drawing, the Wynne Prize for Landscape and the Sir John Sulman Prize, by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Margo Lewers (1908–1978) was an Australian interdisciplinary abstract artist who worked across the media of painting, sculpture, tapestry, ceramics and the domestic arts. She was renowned for a number of major public commissions and for her landscaping and interior design for the family home at Emu Plains. Her early compositions explored colour and formal geometric abstraction; her work became more fluid and expressionist by the early 1960s. She showed extensively in Australia and in several international travelling exhibitions. She won at least fourteen awards and prizes. The Penrith Regional Gallery and Lewers Bequest now stands on her property at Emu Plains.
Howard Hinton was an Australian art patron and benefactor. A thwarted artist due to shortsightedness, he visited many of the great galleries of Europe in his youth. At age 24 he migrated to Australia and quickly associated with leading artists of the Heidelberg School and the bohemian artists' camps around Sydney Harbour in the 1890s. He built a successful career in shipping and used his moderate wealth to support waves of Australian artists in the first half of the twentieth century. Through extensive donations to the Art Gallery of New South Wales and particularly the Armidale Teachers' College he became one of the greatest benefactors in Australian art history.
Nell is an Australian artist working across performance, installation, video, painting and sculpture. In 2013 she won the University of Queensland Self-Portrait Award. In 2017 she was inducted into the Maitland City Hall of Fame in the category of The Arts.
The Julian Ashton Art School was established by Julian Ashton in 1890 as the "Academy Julian", has been an influential art school in Australia. For a long time it was known as the Sydney Art School.
The Royal Art Society of New South Wales, or Royal Art Society of NSW, was established in 1880 as the Art Society of New South Wales by a group of artists including Arthur and George Collingridge, with the aim of creating an Australian school of painting, and separate from the NSW Academy of Art. Their first exhibition was held in the Garden Palace. In 1902 the Society merged with the Society of Artists and received royal assent from King Edward VII to add "Royal" to their name.
Morning Light is a 1916 painting by the Australian artist Elioth Gruner. The painting depicts a small herd of dairy cows in a grassy field in the morning with a man, the farmer, in the foreground. Hailed as the high point of [his] Emu Plains series" and "one of his greatest masterpieces", Morning Light was awarded the Wynne Prize in 1916.
