The Great Hall Ceiling
Leonard French (1928 to 2017) · 1968
Walk to the far end of the ground floor, past the shops and the garden entrance, and you come into a great room whose ceiling is a blaze of coloured light. The Great Hall roof is one of the largest stained glass ceilings in the world, made by the Melbourne artist Leonard French for the opening of the gallery in 1968. Thousands of pieces of thick slab glass in reds, blues, golds and greens are held in a grid of triangles, and on a sunny afternoon the colours fall on the floor and on the people lying beneath it. Lying down is exactly what visitors do here, and the gallery encourages it. Children sprawl on the carpet and adults stretch out beside them to look up.
French worked with a French glass technique known as dalle de verre, in which chunks of glass several centimetres thick are set into a frame rather than joined with lead. The ceiling is divided into a system of triangular panels that repeat and rotate, forming stars and hexagons, so that the whole surface has a rhythm like a woven cloth. Look for the shifts in colour from warm to cool as you move along the hall. The glass is not painted; the colour is in the material itself, and the thickness of each piece changes the intensity of the light that comes through. French said he wanted people to feel as if they were inside a jewel.
The architect Roy Grounds gave French the commission as part of his design for the new gallery on St Kilda Road, and the ceiling was an extraordinary act of confidence in an Australian artist at a time when local art was often overlooked. The Great Hall has been used for concerts, dinners and state occasions ever since, but its everyday life is what matters: it is the place where a visit to the gallery slows down. A memorable detail is the way the pattern seems to change through the day as the sun moves, so that no two visits look the same.
Did You Know? Visitors are welcome to lie on the floor of the Great Hall and look up, and many do.
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