The National Gallery of Victoria, popularly known as the NGV, is an art museum in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Founded in 1861, it is Australia's oldest and most visited art museum.
Thomas William Roberts was an English-born Australian artist and a key member of the Heidelberg School art movement, also known as Australian impressionism.
Sir William Dobell was an Australian portrait and landscape artist of the 20th century. Dobell won the Archibald Prize, Australia's premier award for portrait artists on three occasions. The Dobell Prize is named in his honour.
Sir George Russell Drysdale, also known as Tass Drysdale, was an Australian artist. He won the prestigious Wynne Prize for Sofala in 1947, and represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1954. He was influenced by abstract and surrealist art, and "created a new vision of the Australian scene as revolutionary and influential as that of Tom Roberts".
John Henry Olsen AO OBE was an Australian artist and winner of the 2005 Archibald Prize. Olsen's primary subject of work was 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.
Roland James "Rowley" Pope was an Australian cricketer best known for representing the Australian national cricket team in one Test match in 1885, and later also known as an ophthalmologist and philanthropist. From Sydney, New South Wales, he was selected for the Test as the result of a player strike during the English tour of Australia during the 1884–85 season, and made three runs across his two innings. Having studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, Pope was head of the ophthalmology section of Sydney Hospital for a period of 17 years, and was later involved in the establishment of the library and art gallery of the City of Newcastle.
Janet Dawson MBE is an Australian artist who was a pioneer of abstract painting in Australia in the 1960s, having been introduced to abstraction during studies in England while she lived in Europe 1957–1960 She was also an accomplished lithographic printer of her own works as well as those of other renowned Australian artists, a theatre-set and furniture designer. She studied in England and Italy on scholarships before returning to Australia in 1960. She won the Art Gallery of New South Wales Archibald Prize in 1973 with the portrait of her husband, Michael Boddy Reading. She has exhibited across Australia and overseas, and her work is held in major Australian and English collections. In 1977 she was awarded an MBE for services to art.
John Beard is a Welsh artist and painter born in Aberdare, Wales, now based in Sydney, Lisbon and London.
Shearing the Rams is an 1890 painting by Australian artist Tom Roberts. It depicts sheep shearers plying their trade in a timber shearing shed. Distinctly Australian in character, the painting is a celebration of pastoral life and work, especially "strong, masculine labour", and recognises the role that the wool industry played in the development of the country.
Macquarie Galleries was a Sydney private art gallery established in 1925 by John Henry Young and Basil Burdett. It was located at "Strathkyle", 19 Bligh Street Sydney then moved to 40 King Street in 1945. From 1991 to 1993 it was located at 83–85 McLachlan Avenue, Rushcutters Bay. It is currently located at 585 Grosvenor Place, Sydney. There are also associated Macquarie Galleries in Canberra and Perth.
Michael Kmit was a Ukrainian painter who spent twenty-five years in Australia. He is notable for introducing a neo-Byzantine style of painting to Australia, and winning a number of major Australian art prizes including the Blake Prize (1952) and the Sulman Prize. In 1969 the Australian artist and art critic James Gleeson described Kmit as "one of the most sumptuous colourists of our time".
Peter Purves Smith, born Charles Roderick Purves Smith, was an Australian painter. Born in Melbourne, Purves Smith studied at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London and under progressive art teacher George Bell in Melbourne.
Footballer is a 1946 painting by Australian artist Sidney Nolan. It depicts an Australian rules footballer standing before a crowd of spectators at a football match. For many years the painting was thought to be a generic image of a footballer, however Nolan later revealed that the painting is based on Bill Mohr, a star player for the St Kilda Football Club during the 1930s.
Constance Stokes was an Australian modernist painter who worked in Victoria. She trained at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School until 1929, winning a scholarship to continue her study at London's Royal Academy of Arts. Although Stokes painted few works in the 1930s, her paintings and drawings were exhibited from the 1940s onwards. She was one of only two women, and two Victorians, included in a major exhibition of twelve Australian artists that travelled to Canada, the United Kingdom and Italy in the early 1950s.
The theft of The Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria took place on 2 August 1986 in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. The stolen work was one of a series of paintings by Pablo Picasso all known as The Weeping Woman and had been purchased by the gallery for A$1.6 million in 1985—at the time the highest price paid by an Australian art gallery for an artwork. A group calling itself "Australian Cultural Terrorists" claimed responsibility, making a number of demands in letters to the then-Victorian Minister for the Arts, Race Mathews. The demands included increases to funding for the arts; threats were made that the painting would be destroyed. After an anonymous tip-off to police, the painting was found undamaged in a locker at Spencer Street railway station on 19 August 1986. The theft still remains unsolved.
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.
Sofala is a 1947 painting by Australian artist Russell Drysdale. The painting depicts the main street of the New South Wales town of Sofala. The painting won the Wynne Prize for 1947. The Art Gallery of New South Wales describe the work as "one of [his] finest paintings, representing the artist at the height of his powers." and that "the painting transcends literal description of a particular place to become an expression of the quintessential qualities of an inland Australian country town".
Gallery A was a mid-century Australian gallery that exhibited contemporary Australian art. It was established in 1959 at 60 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, and then relocated to 275 Toorak Road., South Yarra. A second Gallery A venue was opened and run concurrently at 21 Gipps Street, Paddington in Sydney from 1964, and a third in Canberra. The Sydney business largely displaced the Melbourne gallery, which also closed in 1970, and continued until 1983. Its founder was Max Hutchinson and other directors during the history of the gallery at its three venues included Clement Meadmore, James Mollison, Janet Dawson and Ann Lewis.
