As most Australian readers will know, the NGV is the oldest public art museum in this country, with the largest and most wide-ranging collection – from pre-classical antiquity to contemporary Indigenous Australian, from every continent, and across most media. The essays in this volume present object-centred research, ‘drilling down’ into what underpins the institution: the richness of its holdings and the expertise of its caretakers.

In one of eight longer articles, director Gerard Vaughan documents a suite of four over-life-size nineteenth-century marble royal portraits that were once in the NGV and no longer are – a cautionary tale about the wisdom of de-accessioning things on grounds of fashion, if ever there was one. Ted Gott likewise explores the intriguing byways of art history (as it is rarely possible to do on a gallery label or in the sort of big-name publication that accompanies a ‘blockbuster’ exhibition). Gott revisits an English painting purchased in the 1870s and discovers the artist’s contacts with Charles Dickens. Independent writer Heather Barker, and Charles Green from the University of Melbourne, document the origin and aftermath of one of the most influential travelling exhibitions ever to come to Australia, Two Decades of American Painting, in 1967. They reveal that it would never have happened without the combined vision of curators John Stringer at the NGV and Daniel Thomas at the Art Gallery of New South Wales; the NGV director Eric Westbrook; and funding from the American collector of Australian art, Harold Mertz. Also from outside the NGV, Helen Ennis, a former NGA curator now at the ANU, writes perceptively about the Melbourne photographer Sue Ford, who died in 2009; while former AGSA director and NGV senior curator Christopher Menz, on the Viennese architect–designer Adolf Loos, whets the appetite for the superb exhibition Vienna: Art & Design, which is running at NGV International this year.

Five shorter commentaries cover a new installation (the ancient Chinese tomb gallery), an old exhibition (Christo using wool bales), Joseph Wright of Derby’s wonderful long-lost self portrait; and former director Patrick McCaughey recalling acquisitions on his watch of seminal 1940s Melbourne paintings: works by the ‘Angry Penguins’ artists Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, and John Perceval. NGV Conservator Michael Varcoe-Cocks combines technical expertise with scholarship to reveal the personalising inscriptions made by Robert Dowling on the reverse of Tasmanian Aborigines (1856–57).

Finally, there are fourteen double-page spreads on acquisitions in the departments of International Art, Australian Art, Indigenous Art, Asian Art, Decorative Arts and Antiquities, Prints and Drawings, Photography, and Fashion and Textiles. Recent years have seen a bumper crop of gifts and purchases, the latter often with assistance from private and corporate donors; culminating in 2011 with the 150^th anniversary celebrations. The Felton Bequest (the NGV’s largest single source of acquisition funds, a capital endowment made in 1904 by a Melbourne businessman named Alfred Felton) has presented a collection of 173 recent Indigenous works to mark the sesquicentenary, as well as Gustave Caillebotte’s almost abstracted French impressionist canvas, The Plain of Gennevilliers, Yellow Fields (1884). Inter alia, the critical importance of continuing philanthropy is clear. The purchase in 2010 of Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude’s photocollage-drawing for the Wool works project, with help from chairman of trustees Allan Myers and trustee Bruce Parncutt (among others), is nicely ironic: their predecessors in 1969 had refused one of these preparatory drawings, even though it was supported by both Westbrook and the Acquisitions Committee.

Counting this issue as ‘a milestone with 50 years of continuous publication’ is neat but not quite accurate. In fact, as the useful index to past issues reveals, the NGV’s modest Quarterly Bulletin (from 1945) became the more scholarly and substantial Annual Bulletin of the National Gallery of Victoria in 1959 and adopted its new title with this volume – i.e. fifty issues over fifty-three years, with gaps when funding and staff time were in short supply. The current volume and index will go online, with searchable content (hence the subheadings in the essays); and past issues may be available through JSTOR in the future. However, with a print run of only five hundred, and distribution outside Australia mainly through inter-library exchange, the Journal seems a slightly anachronistic entity. Perhaps it is time to go completely digital – as has the much-admired Technical Journal of the National Gallery in London, which is now free (though generously sponsored). Every publication of the NGV’s holdings is welcome – especially of this quality and when the Gallery’s website is so woefully uninformative in this regard – but the farther afield they can be appreciated, the better.