Category: Brisbane Past

Go back in time to 1885 when Brisbane was a young township

Posted by Elliott Murray   ●   11 May 2023

Harriet Jane Neville-Rolfe’s watercolour Houses of Parliament, Brisbane 1885 (illustrated and currently on display at the Queensland Art Gallery) was painted just before the artist left Australia to return to England. We can clearly see Queensland’s Parliament House and other recognisable Brisbane landmarks from across the river in a depiction of the daily life of…

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Go back in time when Brisbane was a busy shipping port

Posted by QAGOMA   ●   28 Mar 2023

Two paintings by Isaac Walter Jenner (1836-1902) Brisbane from Bowen Terrace, New Farm 1888 (illustrated) and View of Brisbane 1885 (illustrated) are currently on display. Such paintings at the time of their execution supplied the population of Brisbane with artistic impressions of their new home, and in some ways validating it — art as a…

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Go back in time to an evening at Dutton Park in Brisbane

Posted by QAGOMA   ●   12 Dec 2022

Evening (Mt Coot-tha from Dutton Park) 1898 (illustrated) is an accomplished work of a painter aware of the work of his Australian contemporaries Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder. Frederick James (FJ) Martyn Roberts, born in 1871 was 27 at the time he completed Evening using the Australian impressionists broad-brushed technique to depict the…

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Queensland’s National Art Gallery: The opening Collection

Posted by QAGOMA   ●   7 Nov 2022

On 18 September 1894 local artist and president of the Queensland Art Society, R Godfrey Rivers, sent to the Queensland Government a full proposal for a State Art Gallery, Rivers noted that the Government was already in possession of a number of fine engravings. He suggested in his proposal that about fifty be mounted and…

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