The South Kensington Empire and the Idea of the Regional Art Gallery in Nineteenth-Century Victoria

Abstract

The early histories of the four art galleries founded in regional Victoria in the late nineteenth century, in Ballarat (1884), Warrnambool (1886), Bendigo (1887) and Geelong (1896), are closely intertwined: they observed and copied each other as rivals and precedents; they were tied to the hub of Melbourne like spokes on a wheel; they lobbied over the same portion of ever-declining government funding, and they drew on the same pool of experts to advise them. Single-institution histories tend to ignore these connections. This article is an argument for examining their inter-relationship and the ways in which they were collectively shaped by metropolitan and transnational influences. Routinely borrowing from each other, the regional galleries had a close advisory relationship with the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, as the NGV had with the National Gallery in London. While the responsibility for the foundation of regional galleries lay with local communities, they looked traditionally both to the colonial capital in Melbourne and to the capital of the British Empire for models to imitate. In turn, the metropolitan art museums of Melbourne and London looked to the Australian provincial network as a natural sphere of their influence.