Arthur Boyd took a train journey in 1953 on the Ghan from Port Augusta in South Australia to Alice Springs and then travelled for another hundred miles by jeep into the Simpson Desert to Arltunga, a former mining community. Here for the first time he experienced the presence of the displaced

There are times when Brett Whiteley’s paintings are unusually lyrical. Certainly, Whiteley is one of Australia’s most lyrical artists, generally in the free use of his easy, languorous lines and particularly when they describe a curve, an arm, a thigh or a tree trunk. However, in paintings s

In Garry Shead’s oeuvre, the 1990s was a golden period for his art. It was a time when he attained national recognition with his D.H Lawrence series and then The Royal Suite. In 1993 he was awarded the Archibald Prize for his amazingly expressionistic portrait of Tom Thompson and his art was

Ian Fairweather is one of Australia’s most enigmatic and respected artists – special rooms of his work are set aside in the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Queensland Art Gallery.  Fairweather’s paintings are also very keenly sought after and his paintings are rare as he destroyed mu

Throughout his career Sidney Nolan chose to represent certain narratives and figures that are iconic within Australia’s colonial history. While fascinated by the avant-garde cultural milieu of Paris, which he would discuss with his friends John and Sunday Reed and explore through their exten

Norman Lindsay’s pirate subjects would have to be some of his most adventurous works, always brimming with swashbuckling figures and their hedonistic pursuits, depicted in a lively palette by the artist. It is no surprise that pirates were a favourite subject of both Norman and his brother,

The naked female form fascinated the famous French artist Aristide Maillol throughout his lifetime. The present domestic-sized bronze sculpture, Baigneuse Debout se Coiffant, le Coude Levé, is a very fine and characteristic example of his sophisticated work. It resonates with the spirit of w

Charles Conder was an extraordinary figure in Australian art: precocious, gifted, and outrageously successful. He is now fully acknowledged as a major figure in Australia’s cultural heritage – his works are passionately collected (Barry Humphries has the world’s largest collection) and in 19

Harold Septimus Power was one of Australia’s finest painter of animals, his significant body of work is testament to the great skill he possessed in capturing the movement and form of animals as varied as plough horses, oxen and dogs. The current work, A Foxhunt in the Midlands, was painted

‘The psyche of the place has bitten into me deeply and I feel unresolved with it in a way that I cannot explain easily.’¹

Lagoon (Mrs Fraser), 1958, is an exemplary work from Sidney Nolan’s second major series of paintings that focussed on Eliza Fraser and the Qu