The Gallery’s first Victorian watercolours

The first works of art bought for the fledgling Art Gallery of NSW were Victorian-era watercolours. The story of why and how they entered the collection reveals much about the tastes and aspirations that shaped both Sydney and the Gallery in those early years.

By the 1870s Sydney had grown from a small town into a confident city, and a feeling of intense civic pride gave special urgency to the question of establishing a public art collection to enlighten the population.

In 1874, the NSW Parliament voted the frugal sum of £500 ‘towards the formation of a gallery of art’, and five trustees were appointed to administer the funds. (These men were already councillors of the NSW Academy of Art, an organisation founded in 1871 to promote the study of the fine arts through lectures, art classes and exhibitions.)

Immediately, lively discussions took place about how to shape the future collection. Since £500 was insufficient to acquire original works by the great masters of the past, the trustees resolved to spend it on ‘copies of first class character of some of the most celebrated paintings of the ancient masters’.

However, Eliezer Levi Montefiore (one of the trustees who had not been present at the meeting, who would later become the Gallery’s first director) railed publicly against the decision and successfully incited his fellow trustees to have it repealed. He held that watercolours by living artists – which were greatly prized and much more affordable than oil paintings – were preferable to copies of old masters, noting in particular that ‘the study of watercolours is very largely followed by art students in Sydney’.

Imported British art, as opposed to locally produced art, was considered most appropriate for Australian colonial galleries generally, so inexorably linked were this country’s cultural aspirations to the Empire, and so acute were local pretensions to English civilisation.

This didn’t preclude a certain pride in local artistic achievement or indeed the acquisition of some Australian watercolours. However, the emphasis of the early collecting policy, if such a name can be given to the process, was squarely fixed on contemporary British art.

In August 1874 the trustees established the London Selection Committee and appointed artist Nicholas Chevalier and critic Colin McKay Smith to advise on and undertake the purchase of watercolours.

By mid 1875 Chevalier and Smith had reported back that the expenditure of the initial sum had been made. Six landscapes by Oswald Brierly, John Henry Mole, Paul Naftel, Thomas Miles Richardson Jnr, Henry Brittan Willis and Josiah Wood Whymper – all reproduced here – marked the modest beginnings of the collection, and set a pattern of collecting watercolours that would continue for some three decades.