Adelaide Part Two - Art Treasures of Adelaide

On my other afternoon off I decided to go for a quick trip to the art gallery and look around the city.

I passed the parliament buildings for South Australia...

The Railway Station... 

Bronze pig sculptures on Rundle Mall...

The War Memorial...

and then arrived at the art gallery...

It was a lovely classical building in a sand stone. Below: The detailing around the front door... 

Some more detailing around the base of some columns and a flattened copper down pipe, recessed into the side of the building...

I like the way the down pipe goes under the frieze band.

It gave me an idea for WBP manor - the down pipe needs to do a zig zag from the guttering above to come down between the columns below. That zig zag is now going to happen behind the frieze line...

The inside the gallery comprised of the front rooms, which were very Victorian...

 

There were works of art depicting the aboriginal people...

and quite a few paintings of pastoral scenes...

Several 18th century and 19th century paintings of classical subjects...

I liked the painting above most of all. If you looked closely apart from the main subject of the painting, there were other things happening around the canvas...

There were examples of colonial furniture...

and gold and silver pieces...

The piece above was odd, it was a cup, whose base depicted an aboriginal man chasing an emu, with two kangaroos mating! But that was not the only strange thing in the gallery. There were also several unusual modern pieces. I'll let you decide on their artistic merit. There was a tattooed hermaphroditic sculpture with a head like Winston Churchill...

A skeleton carved out of wood...

But strangest of all, a giant headless taxidermied horse strung up by its back legs!

The Bronzes: Below is a bronze called the three shades, an original Rodin. I think the subject is a nice counterpoint to the very common subject of the three graces...

There was also a bronze of St Sebastian...

and of the flagellation...

In the last room were art works lit with spot lights on black walls. Here are some striking Chinese golden panels...

and then some very imaginative shadow puppetry. There was a silhouette of a man and a woman's head cast upon the wall by some deftly assembled twigs...