Australia’s first art-treasures exhibition
Hobart, which was often at the forefront of colonial culture from the 1820s, followed suit immediately with its own treasures exhibition. Also privately organised, unlike Manchester, it was staged in a public venue—the Tasmanian Parliament—and opened in 1858.
The implication of cultural richness was ambitious if not pretentious, especially as all the exhibition’s contents came from Hobart itself rather than from around the country as with Manchester. Many of the 359 works were original paintings, watercolours and sculptures that had little or no merit. Many other objects were replicas, whether casts of classical sculptures or copies of famous paintings such as the one piece of public property, a copy of Franz Xavier Winterhalter’s celebrated portrait of Queen Victoria, which usually hung in the Parliament.
Yet the exhibition also included several works that would satisfy almost any definition of ‘treasures’. The European pictures, which dominated the exhibition, included a group by the great British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner, which came from the collection of Francis Russell Nixon, the first Anglican bishop of Tasmania, who was a friend of Turner. The Australian works included the most compelling portrait of the colonial artist John Glover—a miniature on ivory by Australia’s first professional woman artist, Mary Morton Allport, now part of the State Library of Tasmania’s Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts collection.
