Johannesburg Art Gallery
Johannesburg, South Africa
The story
One of the smallest pictures at the Johannesburg Art Gallery is a portrait on a panel about 25 centimetres high. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite painter, made Regina Cordium, the Queen of Hearts, in 1860, a few months after marrying his model, Elizabeth Siddal. The mining financier Sigismund Neumann gave it to the gallery in 1912.
The gallery itself grew out of mining money. Florence Phillips, wife of the mining magnate Lionel Phillips, wanted Johannesburg, a gold-rush town barely a quarter of a century old, to have serious art. The Irish dealer and collector Hugh Lane assembled the founding collection, showed it in London in 1910 and then sent it out. He steered her towards the French Impressionists as well as British painters, and landscapes by Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro hang here today, with harbour scenes by Eugène Boudin.
The English architect Edwin Lutyens designed the building in Joubert Park. It was completed in 1915 but never finished to his full plan. In 1940 the gallery bought Yellow Houses by Gerard Sekoto, the first work by a black artist bought by a South African gallery.
