The story
Sydney's public gallery began in the 1870s with a colony deciding it ought to have art of its own, and for a long time that meant buying Victorian British pictures shipped out from London. The grand sandstone building it settled into on the edge of the Domain, with a classical portico and the names of old European masters carved across the front, still announces those 19th-century ambitions.
What it collects now runs much wider. The Australian holdings trace the country's own painters, from the sunlit landscapes of Streeton and Roberts to the present. The Yiribana Gallery gives a large space to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, and there are strong Asian collections too.
In 2022 the gallery roughly doubled, opening a second building down the slope toward the harbour designed by the Japanese firm SANAA, so a visit now crosses from carved Victorian stone into glass pavilions built over decommissioned wartime oil tanks, one of which is kept as a vast dim exhibition space underground.
