The story
Australia's oldest public art museum opened in Melbourne in 1861, when the colony of Victoria was still flush with gold-rush money and looking to spend some of it on culture. That wealth is why a young frontier city ended up with Old Masters and a Rembrandt.
The building most visitors know, the bluestone pile on St Kilda Road, came later, in 1968. Its architect, Roy Grounds, gave it a moat and a wall of water you pass through the entrance, and above the Great Hall he set a stained-glass ceiling by Leonard French, a vast grid of coloured glass best seen lying on the floor beneath it, which people do.
The collection is now split across two sites, international art on St Kilda Road and Australian art at Federation Square, and it remains the most visited gallery in the country.
Collection
15 works
Ulysses and the SirensJohn William Waterhouse, 1891
The Virgin and ChildAnonymous, 1433
AnguishAugust Friedrich Schenk, 1878
The Banquet of CleopatraGiovanni Battista Tiepolo, 1743
The RescueJohn Everett Millais, 1855
Scene from A Midsummer Night's DreamEdwin Landseer, 1850
The Crossing of the Red SeaNicolas Poussin, 1632
The PioneerFrederick McCubbin, 1904
Shearing the RamsTom Roberts, 1890
The victory of faithSaint George Hare, 1891
Coming SouthTom Roberts, 1886
The Sunny SouthTom Roberts, 1887
Two Old Men DisputingRembrandt, 1628
The Man of Sorrows in the arms of the VirginHans Memling, 1477
The Quarters behind Alresford HallJohn Constable, 1816