Archive & Collection

The National Art School collection is a nationally significant collection of art and historical objects representing the rich and diverse heritage and culture of the National Art School and former Darlinghurst Gaol. The collection documents the site’s rich history and acquires artworks by past and present students and teaching staff of the National Art School. 

The Collection of over 8,000 objects, is invaluable within the National Art School, both as a teaching resource and historical record. Items include works on paper, paintings, prints, sculpture, teaching aides, artefacts and archives related to its important history as an educational institution and the former Darlinghurst Gaol. 

Purpose of our Collection

The National Art School is the custodian of a collection which aims to document the history and works of past and present students and teachers who have studied and worked at the National Art School, and to document the creative and historical activities associated with the National Art School and the site. It represents the heritage and culture of the National Art School and is a unique and nationally significant art collection.

The National Art School encourages appreciation and critical perspectives of art and its role in society through direct engagement with artists and original works of art.

The Collection performs a major role within the National Art School, both as a teaching resource and historical record. Items include works on paper, paintings, prints, sculpture, teaching aides, artifacts and archives related to its important history as an educational institution and the former Darlinghurst Gaol.

It is the largest collection in Australia of student works made on the site where they are housed.

The NAS Collection is divided into three categories:

• The Student Collection
• The Art Collection
• The Archive Collection

The Collection is closely linked to the history of the National Art School, and indeed much of the story of the School can be told through the items held. The Collection is wide ranging with more than 2,000 photographs and countless documents, diplomas and ephemera which form a rich network of meaning when placed alongside the artworks, and reveal the fascinating narrative of the School’s alumni.

The site of the National Art School in the former Darlinghurst Gaol also means that thousands of artists have responded to one of Sydney’s most significant heritage sites by making artworks relating to the buildings and their history. As well as these works, the Collection holds a small but revealing number of items including gaol maps, photographs of inmates and warders, and restraining devices from the gaol period. These have often become the subject matter for works by NAS students in the Collection.

Examples of works in the collection:

Rayner Hoff

2. Rayner Hoff (1894−1937) was born on the Isle of Man in the UK and came to Australia in 1923 to take up a teaching position at East Sydney Technical College. He suggested renaming the art department the National Art School, and he and his students soon dominated sculptural production in Australia throughout the 1920s and 30s.

Hoff became the most successful public sculptor of his era. He was best known for his remarkable sculptures on Sydney’s Anzac Memorial, which were all made in his studio at the National Art School (now the Rayner Hoff Project Space in Building 11).

3. This is the original plaster cast of the bas relief made by Rayner Hoff in London in his first year as a student at the Royal College of Art in 1920. It is an outstanding example of a student work, showing his strong interest in Greek mythology and prodigious early talent. The work remained in the collection of the Hoff family in England until it was transported to Australia and donated by Hoff’s great niece who moved to Melbourne in 2008. 

4. Pioneer is the only original Hoff maquette known to have survived from all the 20 exterior figures on the Anzac Memorial. Hoff modelled the maquettes for these works in clay and then they were enlarged to the final scale (approximately three times the size of the maquette) by his students and assistants. 

5 – 6. Jean Hallstrom (1916−2006) was one of Rayner Hoff’s many talented students. One of her sculptures Olive c.1935, was donated to the NAS Collection in 2025. Thought to be lost, it was offered to the collection by a generous donor, and after restoration is now on display in the NAS Collection exhibition area, 90 years after it was made in Hoff’s class. The model is Olive Richardson, a well-known model in Sydney in the 1930s. NAS teacher Fred Leist also drew Olive and his beautiful drawing is also in the NAS Collection.

7. Another Hoff student was Eileen McGrath (1907−2004), who for three years (1930−33) worked as his assistant on the sculpture for the Anzac Memorial in Sydney, modelling much of the relief work. The exceptional sculpture Pandora was made when she was a student in Hoff’s class at the art school in 1926.

8. Lyndon Dadswell (1908−1986) studied at the National Art School under Rayner Hoff from 1926 to 1929. In 1933 he won the Wynne Prize, and after war service, including a period as an official war artist, he returned to teaching at the National Art School. This portrait is an example of his early work, made well before he developed his later modernist work.  Dadswell became Head of Sculpture at NAS after Rayner Hoff died suddenly, and taught at the National Art School from 1937 to 1966, heading the school from 1966 to 1967. His influence can be seen in the work of generations of the students he taught for nearly thirty years.

Edith Bell Brown

9. Edith Isabella Bell Brown (1864 – 1946) studied art at Sydney Technical College in Ultimo in the 1890s. She began teaching drawing and watercolour in 1894 and continued to teach when the art department moved to ESTC in 1922. 

The art school moved to the former Darlinghurst Gaol site in February 1922 and this work was painted in April, two months after the move. As a historical record of the site and its conversion from gaol to technical college, it is a remarkably significant painting. A note on the back by the artist says the beam in the foreground is from the Darlinghurst Gaol gallows, which were situated in the fork of E wing from 1869 to 1914. It also shows the iron bars on the ground after they were removed from the windows, and the former mess sheds where the prisoners ate their meals.

Elioth Gruner

10. Elioth Gruner (1882 – 1939) was born in New Zealand, the son of a Norwegian father and Irish mother. In 1883 the family moved to Sydney, where Gruner commenced drawing lessons with Julian Ashton from 1894.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Elioth Gruner became Australia’s foremost landscape painter. He won the prestigious Wynne Prize seven times between 1916 and 1937 and gained critical acclaim for his work. His painting Spring Frost is one of the most popular works in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ collection.

He was a close friend of Rayner Hoff and was a regular examiner of student work at the National Art School Diploma exhibitions.

When he died in 1938 at the age of 57, two of his unfinished paintings of Michelago Valley near Cooma were donated to the National Art School by the trustees of the Gruner estate. Donated as a teaching aid, Michelago Valley shows Gruner’s mastery at capturing light across the Australian landscape, and has been admired by NAS students and staff for over 70 years.

Margaret Olley

11. Margaret Olley (1923−2011) was one of Australia’s most significant still life and interior painters, but she also modelled and painted portraits herself. Two paintings of her by other artists won the Archibald prize – William Dobell in 1948, and Ben Quilty in 2011.

Olley began her course at the NAS in 1942, during the Second World War, so classes were greatly reduced and the students were predominately female. She graduated with first class honours in 1945.

This portrait of Olley’s fellow student Jocelyn Rickards (1924−2005) was completed by Olley in her painting class in Building 16 at the National Art School. Found in extremely poor condition in 2008, it underwent extensive conservation work in 2013 as part of a Community Heritage Grant from the National Library.

12. Ena Joyce (b.1925) was at the National Art School at the same time at Margaret Olley. Life models were scarce, and students would often pose for each other. Olley modelled in class, and NAS holds this beautiful drawing of her posing.

James Gleeson

13. Life drawing has always been an integral part of the course at the National Art School, and many students have used these skills extensively in their later work. One of these students was James Gleeson (1915−2008), who later became a teacher, art critic, author and Australia’s best known surrealist artist.

In the 1930s, students drew and painted from the model for at least 12 hours a week, and Gleeson’s expertise in this field can been seen in his surreal paintings of the human figure which draw substantially upon religious imagery and classical mythology.

14.The National Art School holds five of Gleeson’s student life drawings in the collection, and a photograph of him taken in his later years by photographer Greg Weight.

15. Tony Tuckson (1921−1973) was born in Egypt and studied art in London before serving in the British Royal Air Force in WW2. While on leave in Sydney, he met and married ceramicist Margaret Tuckson.  After the war he studied for three years at the National Art School under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme, and later taught at NAS and became deputy director of the AGNSW. When Margaret Tuckson died she left many of Tony’s student works to the NAS collection. These works show his early mastery of colour and abstraction. 

Fiona Hall AO

16 – 17. In 2018 Hall donated two collections of photographs made between 1973 and 1974, when the artist was in her third and fourth years at the National Art School.

These albums are important documents of the School’s history during a period of transition in Australian art and art education. They provide a snapshot of life in the 70s at NAS, and include portraits of staff and students, classes taking place, student demonstrations, bands and performances. 

These early photographs show the artist’s formal development, as she moved from more figurative compositions to a more confident pared-back aesthetic.

Martin Sharp

18. Martin Sharp (1942−2013) studied at Cranbrook School, Sydney under artist Justin O’Brien, and enrolled as a student at the National Art School in 1960. There he met Garry Shead, with whom he collaborated on a student newspaper, the Arty Wild Oat, in 1962. By 1962 the Art Students Ball had become a major part of Sydney’s bohemian arts calendar, with students, staff and models dressing up in themed costumes and dancing late into the night at the Trocadero in George Street or at the Paddington Town Hall. Along with his fellow NAS students, Sharp attended these balls and made posters for them. This important poster, printed at the NAS, was the first poster Sharp ever made. His later distinctive psychedelic posters for Circus Oz, Oz magazine and record covers for bands have their origins in this student work. 

Credited with giving the 1960s pop counterculture its visual expression, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in visual arts from Sydney University in 2012, and a NAS Fellowship in 2013.

19. In 2025 the National Art School was the recipient of generous gift of over 30 works from the Martin Sharp Trust Ltd. These included works by Martin Sharp and his fellow NAS colleagues. The largest work donated was an outstanding painting Sharp made for a record cover for Tiny Tim’s christmas album in 1995.

20.Isabella Edwards

After studying Ceramics at NAS for her BFA, Isabella Edwards completed her Masters in Drawing in 2019, and this exceptional work combines both her major study areas. It documents many of the places where she studied at NAS. From the iconic front gates to the stairs up to the life drawing rooms, and the wheels in the ceramics building which overlooked the drawing studios. 

21. India Jabalonski

India Jablonski completed her BFA in painting in 2025, and this painting was exhibited in the Degree show in the NAS Gallery that year. Never Fail Gully Trail is located on Sydney’s Northern Beaches in Terry Hills and is a long stretch of bushland that India traverses on horseback. The underlying geometrical structure of this trail is discovered through close examination and hundreds of hours of riding the track with her trusted mount ​‘Jools’. The painting process was an act of mapping and remembering her first and experiences of this trail whilst acknowledging its cultural and environmental significance. 

22. Mechelle Bounpraseuth

Mechelle Bounpraseuth is known for the ceramic sculptures that she began creating while a student at the National Art School as a way to understand and process her Lao cultural heritage, her family’s inherited trauma, her childhood memories and the division of labour within migrant family structures. Bounpraseuth studied at NAS under Lynda Draper, graduating in 2016 after only two years having received advanced standing.  She taught ceramics at NAS in 2023, and a solo exhibition of her work was held at the AGNSW in 2026.

Darlinghurst Gaol

The NAS Collection holds a large number of original items, artworks and photographs from the period when Darlinghurst Gaol operated on the site (1841−1914)

23​.In 1871 a photo studio was built near the morgue in Darlinghurst Gaol. Here all prisoners convicted in NSW were fingerprinted and had their photo taken in their civilian clothes on entrance to the gaol. Inmate William Drewett was photographed in this building on site, which is now demolished. 

24 – 25.  One of the most significant items ever purchased for the NAS archive is a photograph album of the site dated c1885-1890. Titled ​‘Sydney Gaol’, this unique album contains 33 original sepia albumen photographs of Darlinghurst Gaol, which is an invaluable research tool for our students and for researchers. The acquisition of the album was made possible in 2025 through 12 generous donors, and many of the images have been scanned and printed for display on site. 

26. Although most of the original Darlinghurst Gaol items were removed from the site when the gaol closed, a few have survived since the gaol period. This ball and chain was found in building 22 in 2008. It is a small ball, weighing only 1 stone (or 6.5kg). The chain is still attached, but the shackle that would have attached it to a prisoners’ leg is missing. Convicts who were committed for secondary crimes after arriving in the colony were often put to hard labour in iron gangs. They had to work in leg irons or with ball and chains to prevent escape. 

27. One of over 20 gaol plans in the Collection, this plan of the completed Darlinghurst Gaol shows the whole site of the gaol in 1900, with the size and use of each room on the ground floor labelled. The plan has been an invaluable resource for researching the early history of Darlinghurst Gaol.

28. This photograph was taken in the south-western corner of the gaol, and shows the guardhouse behind the warders. This is the only guardhouse still standing today, near where the photography studios for the National Art School are located. It is taken from a large glass plate negative, so is a particularly clear print.

29. A later photograph was also taken in the south-western corner of the gaol, but the warders have changed from their guard uniforms and are sitting in the same position and attitude as the photo taken on the same day in their uniforms.

30. The National Art School owns two copies of the death masks of bushrangers Captain Moonlite (Andrew George Scott) and Thomas Rogan. These plaster copies were made by NAS sculpture lecturer David Horton in 2014 from originals housed at the Justice and Police Museum, Sydney.

Death masks were often made after prisoners were hanged. The practice of Phrenology was popular in the 19^th century. It was believed that the proportions of people’s heads could indicate their criminal tendencies.

Captain Moonlite was the most notorious bushranger held in Darlinghurst Gaol. Along with his gang he held up a sheep station near Wagga Wagga and a policeman was killed in the ensuing shootout. He was hanged in Darlinghurst Gaol in 1880 with his 21 year old accomplice, Thomas Rogan.

+61 2 9339 8674
nasarchives@​nas.​edu.​au