National Gallery of Victoria
Australia’s oldest and most visited art museum, famed for its stained-glass Great Hall ceiling.
The National Gallery of Victoria was founded in 1861 and is the oldest public art museum in Australia. For more than a century it shared premises on Swanston Street with the State Library and Museum of Victoria. In the 1960s a dedicated building was commissioned for a site on St Kilda Road, south of the Yarra River, as part of the Victorian Arts Centre precinct. The new gallery was completed in December 1967 and officially opened on 20 August 1968.
The building was designed by Sir Roy Grounds as a monumental bluestone-clad block with a moat and a glass water wall at its entrance. Its Great Hall is covered by a stained-glass ceiling by Leonard French, one of the largest suspended stained-glass works in the world. From 1997 the building was substantially reworked to designs by the Italian architect Mario Bellini, retaining the exterior, central courtyard and Great Hall. It reopened in December 2003 as NGV International, while the Australian collection moved to the Ian Potter Centre at Federation Square.
NGV International displays the gallery's international holdings, which form part of a collection of more than 76,000 works spanning antiquities, Asian and European art, decorative arts, fashion, photography and contemporary practice. The building also hosts the annual Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series and the NGV Triennial of contemporary art and design. General admission to the collection is free. A further gallery, The Fox: NGV Contemporary, is under development in the Melbourne Arts Precinct and is planned to open in 2028.
Highlights
- Leonard French's stained-glass ceiling over the Great Hall
- The glass water wall at the St Kilda Road entrance
- International collection ranging from antiquities to contemporary design
- Bluestone building by Sir Roy Grounds, opened in 1968
- Home of the NGV Triennial and Melbourne Winter Masterpieces
