Art Gallery of Ballarat

An extraordinary account of the development of one of the great Australian art collections lavishly illustrated with works both familiar and rarely seen. 'Stories from the collection' provides a generalist history of Australian Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings and Prints in the context of the growth of the Ballarat collection. Two time-lines are charted: that from the foundation of the Gallery in 1884, and that from the beginning of European Settlement up to the present day. Key works from the collection are featured and discussed in relation to their place in Australian art, but there is also a strong emphasis on connoisseurship: the changing patterns and themes of collecting, over the five generations from when the Gallery first opened to the public.