Botticelli to Van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National Gallery

Presented at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra from 5 March to 14 June 2021, this landmark exhibition brought together 61 paintings spanning 450 years of Western European art, organised into seven thematic chapters: Italian Renaissance painting, Dutch Golden Age painting, Van Dyck and British portraiture, the Grand Tour, the discovery of Spain, landscape and the picturesque, and France and the rise of modern art. Artists represented included Botticelli, Titian, El Greco, Velázquez, Goya, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Turner, Constable, Renoir, Cézanne, Monet, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. The exhibition constituted the largest group of works ever to travel outside the United Kingdom in the National Gallery London’s nearly 200-year history, and the first time that institution had toured an exhibition internationally. It had previously shown in Japan in 2020 (Tokyo and Osaka) under the title Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London, with the Canberra presentation being the final and expanded stop.

The Canberra showing was originally planned as a summer blockbuster for 2020 but was postponed when the COVID-19 pandemic closed borders and halted international shipping. When it finally opened in March 2021, the National Gallery of Australia became one of the first major museums in the Southern Hemisphere to host a large-scale international exhibition in the pandemic era. The National Gallery London was itself intermittently closed during this period, giving Australian visitors rare access to works that had rarely if ever left London. Highlights included Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait at the Age of 34 (1640), Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888), and Vermeer’s A Lady Seated at a Virginal (c. 1670), shown alongside its pair, A Lady Standing at a Virginal, which also travelled from London.

The exhibition drew 200,975 visitors over its hundred-day run, making it the National Gallery of Australia’s most attended exhibition in more than a decade (the all-time gallery record, 476,212 visitors, belongs to the 2010 show Masterpieces from Paris: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and beyond). Timed-entry tickets sold out weeks in advance. The Canberra season was exclusive: the exhibition did not travel to other Australian cities.