Search / victoria baker

The bright-eyed Mariner

Giving a dam

Ensconced and meditative in crisp Tasmania, Joanna Gilmour pays tribute to passionate green advocate and photographer Olegas Truchanas.

Diamond Doll

Karen Vickery delights in a thespian thread of the Australian yarn.

Rock star

Jennifer Coombes explores the lush images of Picnic at Hanging Rock, featuring Anne-Louise Lambert’s Miranda, the face of the film. 

Mother’s muse

Inga Walton traces the poignant path of photographer Polixeni Papapetrou, revealed in the NGV’s summer retrospective.

Give me five

National Portrait Gallery director Karen Quinlan AM nominates her quintet of favourites from the collection, with early twentieth-century ‘selfies’ filling the roster.

Fugue in Yellow

Roger Benjamin explores the intriguing union of Lina Bryans and Alex Jelinek.

Profile of a marriage

Dr Sarah Engledow explores the lives of Sir George Grey and his wife Eliza, the subjects of a pair of wax medallions in the National Portrait Gallery's collection.

The portrait writ large

Karen Vickery on Chang the Chinese giant in Australia.

Graeme Drendel

I like talking about Drendel’s pictures as if they expressed dreams of my own.

Empirical art

Several years ago I came across this curious painting on the racks in a distant, dusty corner of the store room in the basement of the Johannesburg Art Gallery in South Africa. Since then the mystery surrounding it has never been far from my mind. 

It's a Mora!

Select extracts from Mirka Mora's autobiography, Wicked but Virtuous, provide rich accompaniment to recent Gallery acquisitions.  

The silent partner

One half of the team that was Eltham Films left scarcely a trace in the written historical record, but survives in a vivid portrait.

Pen power

Politics and personae in the portraiture of TextaQueen by Jane Raffan.

Fits of delicacy and despair

Henry Mundy's portraits flesh out notions of propriety and good taste in a convict colony.

Less than six degrees of separation

Dr Anne Sanders NPG Curatorial Researcher investigated the lives of the pioneering psychologists whose portraits are featured in Inner Worlds.