The story
The Art Gallery of South Australia sits on North Terrace in Adelaide, the wide boulevard the colony lined with its museum, library and university, a whole cultural quarter built in a generation. The gallery opened in 1881, at first inside the public library, and grew into its own grand building alongside.
Its collection is one of the most comprehensive in Australia. It runs from Australian art, colonial to contemporary, through a substantial British holding shaped by the colony's ties to Britain, and into Aboriginal art and a respected group of Asian works. The Elder Wing, with its high-lit rooms, still hangs pictures in the dense Victorian manner.
Because it grew up beside the library, the museum and the university, the gallery still shares its garden and frontage with them, so a visitor can cross from fossils to books to paintings without leaving one long terrace.
