The ‘art barn’, 1885

The enormous Garden Palace, built for the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition, was entirely destroyed by fire on 22 September 1882, exactly two years to the day from the rededication of the Fine Arts Annexe as the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The fire made world news. Le Temps estimated the loss of the building and its contents at half-a-million pounds sterling. The artist Ford Madox Brown read about the fire in the London Daily News and thought that his painting Chaucer at the court of Edward III 1847–51 had been destroyed.

The disaster gave urgency to the Gallery’s requests for a more permanent, fireproof structure. After much debate about the location of this building, in mid-September 1884 parliament confirmed: ‘25 to 15 that the site for the new Art Gallery should be on the south east corner of the Domain’. John Horbury Hunt, an architect in private practice, was chosen over the colonial architect James Barnet. Hunt’s designs for a building consisting of a central hall flanked by six other galleries were approved on 14 November 1884 and construction began shortly after. Dubbed the ‘art barn’, this simple brick structure had a roof of 14 lateral sawtooth trusses on steel girders, covered with corrugated iron, giving it the appearance of a factory. It was officially opened by the governor on 23 December 1885.