Art in Melbourne: Tiepolo, Waterhouse and Australian Painting at the NGV

Tom Roberts paid two girls sixpence each to kick up dust in an empty shearing shed. He needed the air to look occupied. One of the girls, Susan Bourne, also supplied the model for the young tar-boy in Shearing the Rams. An image that seems to catch work in progress depended partly on a small performance arranged after the workers had gone.

The National Gallery of Victoria makes Melbourne a place to examine how such pictures become public property. Some European paintings crossed the world almost straight from their first exhibitions. Australian paintings could wait much longer for acquisition. Plan for the institution's two buildings, NGV International on St Kilda Road and the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia at Federation Square. Check individual works before travelling, including the effect of temporary gallery closures; the collection belongs to the city even when its entire contents cannot be seen at once.

Dust, wool and a Collins Street audience

Roberts began the studies behind Shearing the Rams at Brocklesby Station near Corowa. The finished painting was shown in his Melbourne studio in 1890. The rural scene thus had an urban audience from the beginning. Men bend over the sheep while the shed's structure organises their labour into a succession of related movements.

The details prevent that order from becoming too abstract. Oil bottles for sharpening stones catch the light; a pair of shears rests against a wall. Each item belongs to a particular task, yet Roberts has selected and arranged them. The paid dust-raising is a useful reminder that convincing observation and construction can occupy the same picture. Looking carefully does not mean accepting the scene as an unplanned instant.

The NGV acquired the canvas through the Felton Bequest in 1932, decades after its completion. Alfred Felton had died in 1904, leaving an estate whose income was divided between charitable work and the gallery. His money helped purchase Australian pictures as well as European art. A shearing shed and a Venetian banquet could reach Melbourne's public through the same financial mechanism.

A family's progress leaves a grave

McCubbin's The Pioneer moves through three panels, borrowing the format of an altarpiece for a settler family's story. In the first, a couple arrives in the bush. In the centre, a child and a house indicate a life established. The final scene introduces a grave and a distant city. The picture was painted in 1904, shortly after Federation.

The ending is less definite than it first appears. We do not know who has died, or if the man by the grave is the original settler, his son or somebody else. Reading the panels as a continuous biography produces questions the canvas does not settle. The distance between the figures and the city makes an individual loss part of a larger account of development.

That account has a point of view. It presents European settlement as a sequence of labour, family and sacrifice; Indigenous lives do not enter this family narrative. The land is the setting for newcomers' progress. Recognising the omission does not require inventing another story inside the frame, but it does prevent the triptych from becoming an adequate history of the place it depicts.

Compare the first clearing with the final view through the trees. Buildings appear at a distance while the foreground remains occupied by a single figure. McCubbin lets the public future and the private cost exist at different scales. You can admire the handling of light while remaining alert to what this version of nationhood includes and excludes.

Cleopatra spends a pearl; Melbourne buys a banquet

Cleopatra holds the expensive answer to a wager in Tiepolo's The Banquet of Cleopatra. In the story told by Pliny, she proves that she can outspend Mark Antony on a feast by dissolving a precious pearl in vinegar and drinking it. Treat it as the ancient tale the painter inherited, rather than a verified account of a meal.

The gesture is small compared with the surrounding architecture and costume. Tiepolo gives the waste an audience. A banquet becomes a stage on which the power to destroy value proves the ability to possess it. Look at the distance between Cleopatra's hand and the spectators beyond the table. The anecdote needs that social space; without witnesses, the wager loses its point.

Purchased in Venice for Augustus III of Saxony in 1744, the painting later entered the Russian imperial collection. It was even installed on a ceiling at the Mikhailovsky Castle in St Petersburg. Soviet authorities sold it in 1932, and it entered the NGV in 1933 through the Felton Bequest. Its movement to Melbourne belonged to a much larger redistribution of collections, not a direct journey from Tiepolo's studio.

Conservation adds a less ceremonial detail. X-rays revealed that Tiepolo changed the dog's tail several times, eventually tucking it beneath the animal. Even in this display of immense expenditure, a small piece of anatomy required reconsideration. After following the pearl, find the dog. The painting becomes more approachable when its maker is allowed a practical problem.

Waterhouse's sirens cause trouble ashore

Melbourne did not unanimously welcome Ulysses and the Sirens. Bought in 1891 after its appearance at London's Royal Academy, the painting prompted local criticism of its interpretation of Homer and accusations that the gallery's trustees had misused public money. The sirens' journey to Australia produced an argument about what a public collection should buy.

Waterhouse gave them women's heads and birds' bodies, drawing on an ancient Greek vase in the British Museum. Some critics expected more conventionally seductive women seated on a rock. Archaeology offered support for the hybrids, but did not make every viewer like them. The creatures close around the boat, bringing temptation into the sailors' immediate working space.

Ulysses has ordered his men to bind him to the mast and stop their own ears. He wants to hear what they must resist. That unequal arrangement makes the crew's physical work essential: the hero experiences the song while other men keep the vessel moving. Watch the relationship between wings and oars. The picture cannot give us music, so it makes the pressure of listening visible as bodies crowded together.

A sheep refuses to leave

August Schenck's Anguish reached Melbourne in 1880 following its appearance in the 1878 Paris Salon. An ewe stands over a dead lamb in the snow, surrounded by crows. The birds wait. The scene asks us to read determination and grief in an animal, making a landscape feel like a confrontation between an isolated individual and an organised crowd.

Set that sheep beside the animals in Roberts's Shearing the Rams. There the bodies participate in a system of labour and national prosperity; here one body becomes the centre of an emotional drama. Neither picture is an unmediated account of sheep. Their difference is a good reason to keep the European and Australian parts of the visit in conversation.

If you divide the NGV across two days, give each building a proper visit rather than fitting the second into the last hour. If you have one day, choose a short list and confirm the relevant access first. Take a break between the two collections. The dust in a shed and the silence around a dead lamb will stay with you longer if you allow some ordinary city life between them.