Collection highlights tour

'Central Australia' is among the most majestic paintings of the series that emerged out of Nolan's visit to Central Australia during 1949. Nolan himself stated to Professor Ford, who purchased this painting from Nolan's 1950 solo exhibition at David Jones' Art Gallery, that 'in many ways it was, I think, the most complete statement I was able to make on Central Australia'. Like other paintings of this series, it arose out of Nolan's experience of flying over inland Australia, accompanying mail runs to remote settlements. Using an aerial viewpoint to increase the sense of vastness, his painting celebrates the extraordinary beauty of desert colour, form and light.

Following his Sigean abstractions, Whiteley's increasing preoccupation with the female torso led to his bathroom series which preserved the warm colours of his abstractions while constrasting them with the bathroom's acid blues and greens. The series signalled his breakthrough as a figure draughtsman and his desire to make eroticism more explicit: 'All the paintings I have made in the last four years have been concerned one way or another with sex and the desire to record sensual behaviour.' - Brett Whiteley 1964 Focusing on the naked form of his wife Wendy in the bath, Whiteley's Woman in bath series, captured the tactility and tones of her flesh with a profound intimacy, rarely equalled in later paintings on this subject.

Throughout its construction, which was completed in 1932, the Sydney Harbour Bridge inspired many artists to redefine their visions of the city and the harbour by incorporating this new industrial structure. This painting shows the massive frame-work in mid-construction, emerging from the shores of North Sydney. It reveals Grace Cossington Smith’s view of the bridge as a dynamic work-in-progress. In a powerful translation of forms through colour and light, the painting radiates optimism and energy in a celebration of modern engineering and, more broadly, the modern age. The artist made many pencil studies onsite, which she inscribed with notes on colour, took back to her studio and transformed into an iconic expression of Sydney’s most enduring urban monument.

Yorta Yorta painter, sculptor and activist, Lin Onus developed a distinctive visual language from a combination of traditional and contemporary Aboriginal imagery. Lin Onus was unjustly expelled from school on racist grounds at the age of 14, yet later attended university. He worked as a mechanic and spray painter, before managing his father's boomerang workshop in Melbourne. A self-taught artist, Onus forged a brilliant career and held exhibitions throughout the world. Onus's political commitment was inherent in his work. His Scottish mother was a member of the Communist Party, while his Aboriginal father, Bill, and uncle Eric were leading lights in the Aboriginal rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. After a visit to Maningrida in 1986, Onus began his long and close association with the late Djinang artist, Djiwut 'Jack' Wunuwun and other central Arnhem Land artists, including John Bulunbulun. Onus then developed his signature style of incorporating photorealism with Indigenous imagery. It is a virtuos

Freddie Timms was born at Ngarrmaliny (after which he takes his name). He worked as a stockman on various East Kimberley cattle stations for most of his life and he helped paint the boards and danced for the Gurirr Gurirr ceremony devised by Rover Thomas. Subsequently when canvas and paints were supplied to some of the more senior artists, including his father-in-law George Mung Mung, Timms asked for painting materials and he has continued to paint ever since. His style conforms to the East Kimberley archetype originated by Rover Thomas but is recognizably his own with discrete areas of colour outlined in double rows of dots. Timms usually takes an aerial perspective on country and his paintings represent intimate and personal maps of the East Kimberley landscape. Jack Yard is a place on Bow River Station where Freddie Timms lived as a boy. The pastoral lease is now owned by family members. In the painting 'Jack Yard' 2004, the road is shown entering the country of the painting near a spring (near the pink s

Rusty Peters, like many East Kimberley painters, spent his youth working as a stockman on cattle stations throughout the Kimberley, and earned a reputation as an accomplished horse breaker. Along with other Gija community elders, Peters was influential in establishing the Ngalangangpum bicultural school – the first school at the main Gija community Warmun (Turkey Creek) – ensuring that instruction in Gija law and culture was prominent in the curriculum. In 1989, Peters moved to Kununurra, where he worked as an assistant at Waringarri Aboriginal Arts, a community owned Aboriginal art cooperative. He often worked closely with Rover Thomas, the East Kimberley's most renowned painter and a co-founder of the regional contemporary painting movement. Although Peters occasionally produced small canvases during this period, he did not begin painting in earnest until 1998, after he had left Waringarri to join the newly founded Jirrawun Aboriginal Arts. Since then he has had a series of successful group and solo exhibi

Traditional in subject matter and experimental in style, the paintings of Ginger Riley Munduwalawala are impressive pictorial presences, not least because of their scale and dramatic colour schemes. As an elder of his community, the artist is entrusted with the preservation of aspects of the stories of his mother's people at Four Arches, 45 kilometres inland from Limmen Bight in the Gulf of Carpentaria.Limmen Bight country is the landscape depicted in this stately retelling of the story of the first being, a kangaroo, shown in solitary grandeur at the bottom of Riley's successively layered composition. In order to populate the world, it was the task of this being to find himself a mate. Garimala, an ancestral snake, recommended he seek out a young girl, a quest which leads the kangaroo into many deprivations and dangers. The near-fatal spearing shown in the second register was probably in punishment for his trespass on the territory of another clan. The hump-like landforms which characterise the work, and Lim

E Phillips Fox, one of a generation of late 19th-century Australian expatriates in Europe, is renowned for his cosmopolitan and superbly coloured images painted in Paris. 'The ferry' is the artist’s masterpiece. It was developed from rapid sketches that Fox painted outdoors at Trouville, a favourite beach resort in the north of France, and was completed in his Paris studio the following winter. Fox positions the viewer as if peering down to the elegant boating party and immerses us in a sumptuous, genteel world of vibrant colours, luscious fabric textures and warm summer atmosphere. Originally exhibited in Paris and London, 'The ferry' also influenced a younger generation of Australian modernist artists when it was exhibited in Sydney in 1913.

Salon painting as a precept and as a practice had no more loyal adherent than Rupert Bunny. Born and educated in Melbourne, Bunny began a lifetime of European travel and residence in 1884. The success of his academic and essentially escapist project in Paris and London was real, complicit though it proved to be with the self-delusion of an age on the edge of war. Bunny's dedication to the good life resulted in some of the most sumptuous paintings in Australian art history, and the most admired. The artist's wife, kittenish herself, plays with a lapful of cats. Her companion accepts a basin of milk from a meaningfully shadowed maid. As upholstered in privilege as they are in their lacy day-gowns, Bunny's women are the late-picked fruit of a century whose heyday had passed. Despite his stylistic conservatism, the painter kept a finger on the pulse of taste. He responded to post-impressionism and fauvism, albeit belatedly, in a series of brilliantly coloured compositions on classical themes in the 1920s. During

‘The flood in the Darling 1890’ is one of several ambitious canvases painted by WC Piguenit in response to the devastating rains that inundated the western region of New South Wales in 1890. It reflects his respect for the terrifying yet sublime power of nature so admired by exponents of 19th-century German Romantic painting. The largest flood recorded since 1864, waters broke the embankment and submerged the remote township of Bourke – an event Piguenit witnessed first hand. However, rather than depicting the destroyed buildings and railway lines, and the loss of livestock and human life, he has rendered the calm after the deluge. A vast expanse of sky, land and water is rendered as a symphonic celebration, with billowing purplish-hued clouds reflected across a vast glistening expanse reaching towards the viewer – ibises the only living creatures populating the tranquil landscape. Son of a convict transported to Van Diemen’s Land in 1830, William Charles Piguenit is often credited as the first Australian-bo

Arthur Streeton's visions of the landscape have defined an image of Australia. 'Fire’s on' in particular is considered his greatest evocation of the country's heat and sunlight. Painted a year after the artist left Melbourne for Sydney, it constitutes a radical new type of landscape in his oeuvre. Its vertical composition and the high horizon line bring focus to the steep terrain with precarious rocks and dead tree-trunks. The painting captures a critical moment during the construction of a railway line across the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney: the death of a railway worker in an explosion. 'Fire's on' was the warning call before the blast, as the gang dynamited the Lapstone Tunnel through the hillside. The human drama of the painting, however, is overshadowed by the heroism of the landscape itself.

'Sydney Heads', the only known Sydney subject by the artist, is a product of von Guérard's first and only excursion into New South Wales in November 1859, when he visited Sydney, the Blue Mountains and the Illawarra region. The painting was worked up in his studio in Melbourne six years later, most likely on the basis of a preparatory drawing now in the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. Von Guérard's atmospheric rendering of this light-filled scene, together with his sensitive and precise depiction of topographical detail and human activity within a tightly controlled composition, makes 'Sydney Heads' one of his finest paintings. Von Guérard reverted to the composition of the drawing in his 1865 painting of the view - flattening the foreground slope and decreasing the North/South breadth of the Harbour and scale of the hills beyond Manly to increase a sense of space and grandeur. Addition of a tree to the left of Vaucluse Bay provided a picturesque framing device, whilst he also transformed the rough

Between 1884 and 1888 Pissarro experimented with the pointillist method of the younger Seurat. For an avowed anarchist it was perhaps no great step, but in art-historical terms Pissarro's stylistic shift, however momentary, coincided with the end of impressionism's avant-garde ascendancy. 'Peasants' houses, Eragny' was painted during this fascinating interlude. Pissarro has fully absorbed the tenets and techniques of the distinctive style. Form is constructed by discrete juxtaposition of individual strokes, or 'dots', of pigment. Atmosphere is suggested by chromatic scintillation. Surface is treated as a single unity. The mechanical effect which can deaden pointillist painting is obviated by Pissarro's acute sense of the internal dynamics of design. The cast shadows intruding from the right are deliberately naive; this was to be an important innovation for the younger generation of post-impressionists such as Gauguin and Cezanne. AGNSW Handbook, 1999.

Though never officially a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, this colleague of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris was, by inclination and practice, sympathetic to the realist ambitions of the movement. Born in Calais, Madox Brown studied in Belgium and was influenced by the German Nazarene painters in Rome before his first liaison with Pre-Raphaelitism. Working with pure colours and clear contours on a dazzling white ground, and carefully composing his subjects from well-lit life, Brown achieved a sense of pageantry in this tableau. Its lower portions are especially immediate, an extensive cleaning having revealed the glorious condition of the original paintwork. Though Brown began his original composition in Rome, the final canvas was begun in London in 1847, and completed in 1851. Rosetti modelled for Chaucer, while others of the Pre-Raphaelite circle appear as supernumeraries. It was Brown's desire in this, surely one of the greatest modern British paintings in Australia, to encapsulate an hi

When contemplating this picture it is useful to bear in mind that the second half of the nineteenth century was a period remarkable for archaeological researches and discoveries, especially by English expeditions. The British Museum was a treasure house of antiquities increasingly valued by artists as a reference library. Egypt and the Middle East replaced Greece and Italy as the focus of curiosity. 'The visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon' can be contextualised against a craze for orientalist narratives in literature, music and visual art. The wildly composite architectural system of Solomon's temple is reprised in the frame, which bridges the temporal and spatial distance between viewer and subject. The artist has been so obsessed with the accuracy of his details, however, that the figures seem somewhat doll-like. Trained in Paris under Gleyre, Poynter was at heart a Salonist for whom artistry resided in weight of detail rather than dramatic synthesis. AGNSW Handbook, 1999.

Architectonic in construction and architectural in content, this magnificent 'venduta', or view, sparkles with the very light of Venice. This was subject matter tackled time and time again by Canaletto, probably with the aid of a 'camera obscura'; yet despite the artist's concern for accuracy, this painting is nowhere dull or perfunctory in its attention to detail. Having worked as a scenographic artist in the Italian perspectival tradition, and as the son of such an artist, Canaletto was ideally placed to become the greatest recorder of the physical glories of the city-state called 'La Serenissima'. This is not to say that the human glory of Venice is ignored. Canaletto, here as elsewhere, populated the Piazza with a dizzying and deliciously executed array of merchants, friars, wigged officials, masked revellers, mysterious women, children and dogs. If the majority of such views were intended for consumption by English and other tourists, this has not been to the detriment of their remarkable artistic qualit

Though a sense of surface frigidity characterises everything Bronzino produced, emotional heat underwrites his style. As a pupil and adopted son of perhaps the greatest and strangest of mannerist painters, Jacopo Pontormo, Bronzino graduated to artistic maturity with impeccable credentials in that consciously artificial style. That he asserted his own artistic personality, albeit through a steely formality of technique, testifies to the originality of Bronzino's vision. In this magnificent portrait of his principal patron - a work that exists in many replicas and copies - the painter displays a perfectionism it is hard not to think obsessive. Riven with reflections, highlights and shadows, Cosimo's armour alone is an article of transfixing interest: almost reason enough for the painting. It was Bronzino's habit to concentrate on details of costume, jewellery and decoration, to the extent of conceiving the faces of his ducal sitters as polished stones. Apart from this authoritative example, another celebrated