Collecting French art in the late 1800s at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-325
Author(s):  
Chiara O’Reilly
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
Art Gallery ◽  
Art Collections ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Object Based ◽  
History Of ◽  
Formed Part

Abstract From the nineteenth century, Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales has been a marker of cultural ambition in Australia. This paper critically considers five large French paintings purchased at the end of the nineteenth century at significant expense by the gallery. Feted by contemporaries as examples of the French academic style, they formed part of plans to develop a representative collection to further understanding of art in the colony and, over time, they have taken on a rich role in the collective cultural memory. Through close examination of these paintings, their historical reception, criticism, reproduction and traces in the gallery’s archives this article reveals a history of taste, class and the formation of the cultural value of art. Using an object-based approach, it positions these works as evidence of changing cultural ideas within the context of a state collection to offer new insight into their status, the gallery itself, and the multiple roles of public art collections.

Forgetting and Remembering: Scots and Ulster Scots Memorials in Eighteenth-century Ulster, Pennsylvania and Nineteenth-century New South Wales

2020 ◽  
pp. 14-51
Author(s):  
Harold Mytum
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Family History ◽  
Survey Data ◽  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Look Back ◽  
The World ◽  
Formed Part

Mortuary monuments were used by Scots and Ulster Scots as they selectively chose to forget or remember their origins once they settled in new lands around the world. Those who moved to Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century and New South Wales in the nineteenth century employed different strategies regarding how they would create their identities and promote or discard aspects of their origins. Burial monument texts look back over the deceased’s life, but they are also selected by the living to create publicly visible family history and affiliation. Through both text and symbol on the memorials, families create visible, meaningful, biographies. Using survey data from Pennsylvania and New South Wales collected to investigate diasporic remembering and forgetting, this analysis recognises a widespread prevalence of forgetting and an increasing interest in creating new identities in the colonial context. However, some saw their origins as part of their identity and this formed part of the visible family biography.

Footprints in the sand: appraising the archaeology of the Willandra Lakes, western New South Wales, Australia

Antiquity ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 82 (315) ◽  
pp. 11-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Allen ◽  
Simon Holdaway ◽  
Patricia Fanning ◽  
Judith Littleton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formation Process ◽  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Behavioural Patterns ◽  
New Strategies

Here is a paper of pivotal importance to all prehistorians attempting to reconstruct societies from assemblages of shells or stone artefacts in dispersed sites deposited over tens of thousands of years. The authors demonstrate the perilous connections between the distribution and content of sites, their geomorphic formation process and the models used to analyse them. In particular they warn against extrapolating the enticing evidence from Pleistocene Willandra into behavioural patterns by drawing on the models presented by nineteenth-century anthropologists. They propose new strategies at once more revealing and more ethical.

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