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Experience major works from the Gallery's Collection in new contexts, including the focus display ‘Plenty’ highlighting the Gallery’s founding bequest by Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior' and British-born artist Harriet Jane Neville-Rolfe. The International Art Collection profiles early European religious painting, British portraits, Dutch still lifes, and East Asian and European porcelain. From the influence of Japanese art on French Modernism to the representation of daily life, this display explores rich dialogues across time and between cultures, occasionally interspersed with contemporary works that reflect on these themes and histories.

Plenty

‘Plenty’ (until 28 January 2024) features two groups of paintings celebrating fertility and abundance, including the Queensland Art Gallery’s founding bequest. These apparently gentle paintings can be traced to Australia’s early colonial period and the violence of the settler frontier.

Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior MLC left 11 Flemish and Dutch still-life paintings to the new state of Queensland in 1892 on the condition that a public gallery be created. They travelled with him over the course of his life, from a remote bark hut to his final grand residence, bringing with them moral questions around the frontier violence Murray-Prior participated in. The second group, watercolours by British-born artist Harriet Jane Neville-Rolfe, was painted while she was visiting family in remote north-western Queensland from 1883 to 84. They include depictions of a young Aboriginal mother and child, and of settler life in central Queensland. Exhibited alongside contemporary works from d Harding and Jennifer Herd, both groups of paintings are haunted by our colonial history — the dispossession, death and trauma experienced by First Nations peoples as settlers sought to fulfill their dreams, sustain their own families, and create a life of ‘plenty’.