,
Castlemaine Art Gallery and Museum, 1931 Since 17 November 1983 Castlemaine Art Museum is classified by The
National Trust (revised 3 August 1998), which notes its significance as; … an exceptional building in its intent and execution and … historically important as one of the earliest examples of the "modern movement" in provincial Victoria. A building fund was set up in 1923 using a donation of £100 by Sir John and Lady Higgins. A site in Templeton Street was purchased for £1200 but later sold to acquire the present block in Lyttleton Street in 1927 for about £300. That year in a visit to Castlemaine the Hon
George Prendergast enabled a deputation to seek a grant to augment the building fund, to which he offered £1000 on the basis of £1 for every £2 raised locally. Walter J. Whitchell promised £500 for the building fund should the balance be found when the fund held only £760. With the building costed at £3,500, an appeal for funds from the public was launched. Despite the onset of the
Depression, £3,250 was raised in only six weeks from private individuals and companies the
Bank of Australasia,
Ball & Welch and
Bryant & May, Architect
Percy Meldrum, who trained in the United States presented to a reluctant management committee a "modern and artistic" design for the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum (as it was then named) in an American
Art-deco style. The main gallery walls and those of both additional gallery spaces were naturally and indirectly lit from the concealed windows of a
saw-tooth roof above suspended ceilings. The entry steps are Harcourt granite, the parapet of Malmsbury bluestone, and Barker's Creek slate pave the forecourt, on which rest two cuboid planters decorated with panels showing native animals in a sympathetic style by textile artist and sculptor
Michael O’Connell who also provided planters and ornaments to Buda's garden. A "Jazz" style frieze that combines Egyptian and Central American motifs and fluting decorates the parapet, front wall and tympanum over the central front door, itself recessed behind ornate wrought-iron grille gates. The symmetrical facade includes a
bas-relief in
artificial stone featuring a female figure that symbolises Castlemaine surrounded, on the right, by two attendant gold-miners of the past, and artist and sculptor at left. It was designed and carved by
Orlando H. Dutton (1894-1962), an English-born artist working in Australia after 1920. Builder Frank Pollard completed construction between June 1930 and April 1931 for the Gallery and Museum's official opening, free of debt, the
Governor of Victoria Lord Somers conducted the opening ceremony on 18 April 1931 in front of a crowd at the entrance to the Gallery that flowed across the street. It was reported as far away as Canada that;In opening the art gallery, in the presence of a very large gathering, Lord Somers said that he had been amazed at seeing a gallery and a collection so fine. He did not suppose that a gallery of those dimensions would be found in a town of that size anywhere else in the British Dominions. Extraordinary enthusiasm must have been shown to make the gallery possible.Visitor numbers during 1933 increased to 10,000. P. S. Markham and Professor
Henry C. Richards, touring Australia on behalf of the
Carnegie Corporation of New York, reported that the Gallery was "a credit to all concerned ... After Port Sunlight, where Lord Lever's art collection is housed, this small town has probably a better art gallery than any comparable town in the British Empire."
Additions 's sculpture
La Puberta (1866) By 1938 space proved insufficient for special exhibitions and to accommodate the program of public galleries lending artworks and circulating exhibitions amongst them. At Castlemaine that necessitated dismounting the existing collection and storing while a temporary exhibition was on display. The burgeoning collection posed storage problems; in 1942 Sir John Higgins' bequest of his pictures, china, glassware and furniture, could not be housed and the committee was forced to make plans for extensions to be part-funded by his sister Catherine's bequest of £8,300. However, it was not spent due to war and post-war impediments to building.
1960 Impetus for a new extension did not gather until 1956, when the possibility of an internal paved courtyard for sculpture was considered. But only in 1959 was a decision reached to complete the project though the cost had risen to £16,000, beyond the means of the Gallery. The
Bolte ministry promised a subsidy on a pound for pound basis and in late 1960 the adjacent Presbyterian Church donated a strip of land for driveway access to the rear of the building, enabling work to commence. The resulting Higgins Gallery was opened on 23 September 1961, by Dr Leonard Cox, Chairman of Trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria, and it included storerooms, work areas, and shelving and sliding racks for storage of artworks.
1973 A third space for special and temporary exhibitions was funded by a gift of $12,500 from the Stoneman Foundation after which it is named, and a State Government grant of $26,000 and was opened by Premier
Rupert Hamer on 14 September 1973, on the occasion of the Gallery's sixtieth anniversary. from which Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum received $2,000,000 for upgrades and redevelopment by architect Allom Lovell. The 1973 addition at the rear of the building was gutted and turned into the temporary exhibitions gallery with international museum standard climate and lighting controls, and security systems enabling Castlemaine to borrow major national and international works and travelling exhibitions. The high vaulted ceiling naturally lit via
UV-filtered skylights has a hidden shutter system to permit blacking out for exhibitions that require artificial lighting only. echoing the views of then National Gallery of Victoria director
James Stuart MacDonald who, of the
1939 Herald exhibition of contemporary French and English painting sponsored by Sir
Keith Murdoch, proclaimed, 'They are exceedingly wretched paintings ... putrid meat ... the product of degenerates and perverts ... filth'. A demonstration of these conservative values was the Gallery's 1931 commissioning of
James Quinn's painting of the
Duchess of York, then in 1933 to have painter
W B Mclnnes travel to England to portray the Duke of York (later
King George VI). Numbers of 20th-century artists represented were members of the conservative, anti-modernist
Australian Academy of Art (1937–1946), while others joined its rival the
Contemporary Art Society. It was not until 1946 with the purchase for 175 guineas (A$13,000 in 2020) of
Desolation, painted the same year by
Russell Drysdale, a dark expressionist work, that this attitude changed. When added to existing holdings of 105 oils, 57 water colours and 76 etchings, drawings and prints, Even so, the purchase coincided with that of
Rupert Bunny's semi-allegorical 1932
Stepping Stones, and the policy remained still to prefer figurative studies, landscape and portraiture, but to permit semi-abstract works. and finances were particularly strained when it had found a permanent home during a period coinciding with the Great Depression, when all government funding was withdrawn until 1935. Nevertheless, bequests were forthcoming, such as that for the portrait of Edna Thomas, by
John Longstaff, funded from the will of F. McKillop, editor of the
Castlemaine Mail. It relied also on direct donations of works, such as
Billy McInnes's large canvas
Ploughing and etchings by
Norman Lindsay given by Sir
Baldwin Spencer, and Frederick McCubbin's
Golden Sunlight. Locals contributed to special subscription funds in order to secure desirable works unlikely to be donated, as they did in 1925 for
Charles Wheeler's
The Last Ray. Other works have been acquired by exchange; for example The
Australian War Memorial's provision of duplicates of two
Will Dyson lithographs in return for an
Eric Kennington portrait of
Hughie Edwards, the highly decorated
Second World War airman. The Australian Government's Taxation Incentives for the Arts Scheme provided for other donations. In 1916 an annual state government grant of a mere £30 ($2,836.00 value in 2020) was " ... to be spent on pictures, and pictures only". By 1937 this had been raised to £100, with the municipality contributing only £6. In 1980, former Director Perry wrote in complaint to
James Mollison of the
National Gallery of Australia objecting to one of its purchases at auction when both galleries were the only bidders beyond $11,000 for
Margaret Preston's 1925
Still Life, which went to Canberra for a record price of $17,000. Perry felt the richer rational gallery should have withdrawn to let the work through to a less prosperous smaller institution. Government funding tended to be piecemeal; deputations to MPs during the war years and another during the Depression received minor dispensation, and in 1987 Minister for the Arts,
Race Mathews, announced minor capital grants including $60,000 approved to enable the Castlemaine Art Gallery to extend its storage space. The Gallery and Museum received $2,325 in 1988, and then two years later a further $6,000, from the
Australia Council for the Arts Visual Arts/Crafts Board for collections development, and in 1997, part of $2.5m through the state government's Victoria Organisations Funding program, shared with seven other arts institutions. ==Collection==