Naala Nura, the Original Building
Walter Liberty Vernon (1846 to 1914) · 1896 to 1909
The original gallery presents itself to the Domain as a golden sandstone temple, with a portico of six Ionic columns, a pediment and, carved in bronze letters across its face, the names of great artists from Giotto to Raphael. Two bronze horsemen flank the steps, allegories of war and peace. It was built in stages between 1896 and 1909 by Walter Liberty Vernon, the government architect of New South Wales, and its interior, the Grand Courts, is a sequence of tall skylit rooms where paintings hang close together against deep red walls, much as they did when the building opened.
Vernon's design is a late flowering of the classical museum type, and it repays a slow look. The columns are Ionic in the Greek manner, the frieze carries panels that were meant to hold reliefs of the four great ages of art but were never all completed, and the huge bronze doors are decorated with figures. Inside, the Grand Courts keep their original proportions, timber floors and top lighting, and the hang has recently been returned to a dense nineteenth century style with sculpture down the centre. The equestrian bronzes outside, The Offerings of War and The Offerings of Peace, are by the English sculptor Gilbert Bayes and were installed in 1926.
The building has been extended several times behind the facade, notably in the 1970s and 1980s, when the galleries stepped down the hillside in concrete, and in 2022, when it received the name Naala Nura, seeing country, in the language of the Gadigal people. Standing at the top of the steps you can look across the road to the new building, and the two together tell the story of a museum that began as a colonial temple of art and has become a place that faces the harbour and the country around it.
Did You Know? The pediment's carved panels were meant to show the great ages of art but the programme was never completed.
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