National Gallery of Victoria (NGV)
The National Gallery of Victoria is Australia's oldest and pre-eminent public art museum. Its collection is made up of twelve major sub-collections:
Australian Art
Australian Art to 1900
Includes many important works from the colonial period and iconic Australian masterpieces from artists of the Heidelberg School and the pre-Federation era.
Australian Art 1900-1950
Includes representation of the divergent streams of art practice in the first half of the 20th century and singular works produced at the time of Federation and during First and Second World Wars. It includes examples of the significant role women played in the development of post-Impressionism and Modernism in Australia.
Australian Art 1950-1980
Encompasses artists working in Melbourne in the 1950s, exploring the topical social issues and notions of identity. Moving into the 60s and beyond, the collection maps the various forms of abstraction across a range of media, and documents the trend to re-examine Australia's myth, legends and urban life.
Australian Contemporary Art
Focuses on young or emerging Australian artists. It embraces key developments in Australian art of the past 30 years, with a particular emphasis on the practices of Melbourne artists of national and international importance. Post-colonialism, social identify, hybrid art practices and artists' engagement with the natural and built worlds feature in this collection.
Australian Fashions & Textiles
Documents the emergence of independent design from colonial times to now. There is a particular focus on Melbourne, which has been a major fashion centre since the 19th century. There are important holdings of printed and painted textiles, and the representation of ATSI designs in considered the most comprehensive in the country.
Australian Prints & Drawings
Features works by most of the major figures of Australian art from the time of European settlement to the present day. In addition to prints and drawings in various media, the collection includes watercolours, collages, miniatures, artists' books and sketches.
Australian Photography
The NGV was the first Australian public gallery to establish a separate curatorial area to collect photography as a creative medium. The collection aims to comprehensively represent the development of creative photography in Australia and it includes many outstanding and rare items from the beginning of the medium to the present day. NGV seeks to represent the best practice of contemporary Victorian-based photographers and to selectively acquire the work of photographers working in other parts of Australia.
Indigenous
Since 1984-85, when funds were first allocated for purchase of Aboriginal art, the NGV has built a diverse and comprehensive collection of over 2300 Indigenous Australian works, in a wide range of media, that is representative of most of the art producing communities of Aboriginal Australia. The NGV collection is unique in its focus on communities of artists rather than individuals, and in its strong contemporary emphasis. The benefits of this energetic, communal collection policy are evident in the number of special exhibitions, large and small which have been mounted solely from the NGV's holdings.
International Art
International Painting and Sculpture 1300-1800
The development of Italian painting can be studied in depth from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries,in the NGV's International Art collection. The Dutch and Flemish collections are equally rich. The NGV's painting galleries also include fine examples of eighteenth-century French portraiture and pastoral paintings and sculptures The great masters of British 18th century portraiture are represented by major examples along with landscape paintings as well as allegorical and narrative works.
International Painting and Sculpture 1800-1980
Contains fine examples of British academic painting and iconic works by renowned British landscape and marine painters. The Pre-Raphaelites are represented by outstanding works enabling the gallery to present the development of British art in the nineteenth century in extraordinary depth. They combine with the NGV's holdings of decorative arts, fashion and textiles, and prints and drawings, to create one of the world's great displays of Pre-Raphaelite art. The NGV has the most comprehensive collection of French pre-Impressionist and Impressionist paintings in the country. The Gallery's holdings of nineteenth and twentieth-century British and French sculpture are also significant. French painting of the first half of the twentieth century is represented with spectacular paintings. There are also outstanding examples of twentieth-century British painting.
International Contemporary Art
Contains excellent works by some of the most influential artists of the past two decades, and represents works in all media including decorative arts. The most recent major acquisitions encompass painting and sculptural installation practices, and represent internationally acclaimed artists working in Australia, Great Britain, Korea and the United States of America.
International Fashion & Textiles
Includes examples from antiquity to the present, and covers the Americas, South Pacific, Europe and Asia, beginning with 18th century garments and accessories and includes significant holding representing the couture houses of the 20th century. The Schofield collection is considered the most impressive survey of 19th century costumes in Australia.
International Prints & Drawings
This collection is widely acclaimed for the outstanding strength of its pre-1800 holdings and for its representative holdings of 19th century and early-mid 20th century works. Highlights include the series of 36 watercolours by William Blake for Dante's Divine Comedy and the Barlow collection of Durer prints. There are exceptionally strong holdings of Rembrandt etchings and the complete Van Dyck Iconography. The sub-collection extends to contemporary British, European and American prints, and is especially strong in the area of American lithography of the late 1960s and 70s.
International Photography
NGV was the first Australian public gallery to establish a separate curatorial area to collect photography as a creative medium. It aims to represent works from all periods of photographic history, including leading international photographers in the history of photography. Works included in the collection date from some of the earliest photographs made in the early 1840s to contemporary photography.
This has a size of 2,210 items with a financial value of $11.7 million
Note: This figure is less than previously reported due to recent work to clean up collection records.
Decorative Arts & Antiques
Content spans from mediaeval Italian majolica, though outstanding 17th and 18th century European glass and ceramics, 19th century architect-designer works, to revolutionary 20th century furniture and ceramics. The Egyptian and Near Eastern antiquities collections were established largely through the generosity of 19th century donors, and include: Pre-dynastic Egyptian pottery, mummy portraits from the Roman period, jewellery and amulets recovered from archaeological excavations and artefacts from ancient Iraq and Iran. NGV's distinguished Greek and Roman antiquities collection includes works from the Geometric period in ancient Athens, the exuberant themes of the Greek colonies of 4th century BC South Italy.
Asian Art
Principally includes works from India and China. The Chinese ceramic collection is comprehensive and of high quality, covering all periods from Neolithic to the 19th century. India and the Himalayas are represented by a number of impressive Hindu and Buddhist sculptures and outstanding Rajasthani paintings.
Oceanic & Pre Columbian
Oceanic
The NGV is the only fine art venue in Australia to show art from this region. The sophisticated use of materials, iconography and technique is vital and needs to be cross-referenced with other outstanding collections of international art. The collection and subsequent display also acts to convey the enormous artistic diversity to be found throughout the Pacific. Historically, Australian museums have displayed only historic work from these regions without any notion of the artist's objectives or individual style. The response to this region being shown in an art environment has been positively received. This collection has as its basis an important, but modest in scale, collection of works from the 19th and early 20th century.
Pre-columbian
The NGV holds a select, but important, collection of Pre-Columbian works, largely from Mesoamerica, but it also illustrates the great ceramic tradition of South America. There are only two major Pre-Columbian collections in Australia: the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria. The NGA is not currently displaying its collection that differs from the strongly sculptural cast of the NGV's collection.
The development of Italian painting can be studied in depth from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The Dutch and Flemish collections are equally rich. The NGV's painting galleries also include fine examples of eighteenth-century French portraiture and pastoral paintings and sculptures The great masters of British 18th century portraiture are represented by major examples along with landscape paintings as well as allegorical and narrative works. Includes many important works from the colonial period and iconic Australian masterpieces from artists of the Heidelberg School and the pre-Federation era.