European and North American Art

From its establishment in 1881, the Art Gallery of South Australia acquired expensive examples of contemporary British painting by famous living artists such as Frederic Leighton, George Watts, Edward Poynter, Edward Burne-Jones, J.W. Waterhouse, Benjamin Leader, Vicat Cole and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Fine Pre-Raphaelite pictures by Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti followed later, producing in Adelaide a comprehensive repository of High Victorian Art.

Throughout its history the Gallery has continued to buy in the area of contemporary British art, and today the collection includes among the finest concentrations of paintings and works on paper by members of the Camden Town Group and the Bloomsbury Group outside England, including works by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner, Robert Bevan, Malcolm Drummond and, of course, Walter Sickert.

Of the few continental European paintings bought in the early decades the most notable are by William Bouguereau, Giovanni Segantini, and Henri Fantin-Latour. Much later, paintings by Camille Corot, Charles Daubigny, Théodore Géricault, Eugène Boudin, Auguste Renoir and a group of twenty bronze casts of sculptures by Auguste Rodin were added, forming a solid group of nineteenth-century French paintings and sculptures.

By 1910 media other than painting and sculpture, cultures other than British and earlier art-historical periods were being sought by the Gallery, including important examples of English Arts & Crafts and Morris & Co. decorative arts for which there was a ready market among several wealthy South Australian pioneer families.

The Gallery's excellent collection of works on paper was established in 1907 by a substantial bequest by David Murray of German, Netherlandish, French and Italian Old Master prints, a few drawings and a substantial fund for further acquisitions. Augmented by the famous connoisseur Harold Wright, this area of the Gallery's collection has since become one of the richest, containing examples of the work of a number of the greatest masters of European art: Andrea Mantegna, Albrecht Dürer, Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, Francisco Goya, Édouard Manet and many major modern artists. The Gallery owns drawings by Jacopo Tintoretto, Taddeo Zuccaro, Frederico Barocci, Luca Cambiaso, Anthony van Dyck, Guercino and Giambattista Tiepolo.

The Gallery began to acquire Old Master paintings and sculpture in the middle decades of the twentieth century, and a number of the Gallery's most distinguished European masterpieces have entered the collection in the past two decades. The collection includes major paintings by Claude Lorrain, Salomon van Ruysdael and Jacob van Ruisdael, Gaspard Dughet, Salvator Rosa, Willem van de Velde the younger, Jan Both, Luca Giordano & Giuseppe Recco, Anthony van Dyck, William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, J.M.W. Turner and Theodore Géricault. The two strengths of this part of the Gallery's collection are the European landscape tradition from the seventeenth century and the history of British portraiture since the sixteenth century.

Since the 1970s, the Gallery has broadened its collection of international contemporary art. To the works by such prominent British artists as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Richard Long, have been added American paintings by Andy Warhol and Kenneth Noland and sculptures by Donald Judd and Duane Hanson. The greatest strength of the Gallery's collection, however, is German -- incorporating works by Georg Baselitz, Rainer Fetting, Ulrich Rückriem, A.R. Penck and Nikolaus Lang, who has worked in and around Adelaide using local slate and granite.

source:
http://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au /content-collections.html