Queensland Art Gallery
South Brisbane
Updated: Sep 23, 2025
From the time of acquiring its first art work in 1895, the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) has moved buildings five times and amassed a collection of more than 14,000 Australian and International artworks.
Until moving to its current purpose built state of the art premises at South Brisbane complete with water-mall in 1982, it had a history of shuffling from premise to temporary premise, including the Old Museum Building at Bowen Hills in 1931 and before that, in 1905, a gallery wing in the Land Administration Building, now home to the Treasury Hotel.
Its first purchase, in 1896, was Blandford Fletcher’s ‘Evicted’ (a masterpiece depicting the social injustices from the Victorian era of industrialisation), which remains a crowd pleaser today along with ‘Under the Jacarandas’. The latter is a timeless piece of Brisbane evocation by R. Godfrey Rivers (1903) depicting the first jacaranda tree to be planted in Brisbane at the City Botanic Gardens in 1864. The first Australian art work purchased was ‘Care’ by Josephine Muntz-Adams in 1898.
Along with its fine collection of art from the late 19th century and first half of the 20th century (including works by Arthur Streeton, Rupert Bunny and E Phillips Fox, Russell Drysdale and William Dobell), there are works pertinent to Brisbane: Charles Blackman’s North Quay painting ‘City Lights’ from North Quay looking across the river to the QAG site and Sidney Nolan’s haunting ‘Mrs Fraser’, inspired by his obsession with the woman who was shipwrecked on Fraser Island and rescued by a convict from the Aborigines who killed her husband.
Other highlights include the largest collection of Ian Fairweather works in Australia, the abstracts of the 1960s that came out of the watershed NY-inspired ‘The Field’ exhibition in Victoria and the Opus 247 sculpture by Robert Klippel.
On top of marvelling at the colour and design of the beautiful artworks on display, a wonderful highlight for children on a visit to the gallery is the quest to find the tiny mouse doorway, home of Roy and Matilda. Link here to learn more about where to find Roy & Matilda's door in Queensland Art Gallery.
