Curio

The galleries

opened 1910 (Mitchell Gallery) and 1929 (Dixson Gallery)

The three rooms of the Mitchell Gallery and the smaller Dixson Gallery behind occupy the first floor of the Mitchell and Dixson Wings. They can be accessed from the vestibule by the marble staircase, or by the glass walkway from the Macquarie Wing.

The Mitchell Gallery opened as part of the Mitchell Library in 1910, and was originally designed to display pictures and artifacts from the Mitchell collection. The area was extended in 1929 to display the collection of significant historic pictures first offered to the Library by Sir William Dixson in 1919. Designed in the classical style, the rooms feature arched entries and vaulted coffered ceilings similar those in the Mitchell Reading Room and vestibule. The architectural references to ancient Greece are also seen in the ionic columns and plinths. In recent years, a replica of the original tallowood parquetry floor has been installed. Today, the galleries are used for a changing program of exhibitions and displays.

In 1951 the Dixson Gallery was slightly damaged by a fire which had started in a store room on the roof. Again in 1970 a fire started on the roof, this time by a welding accident, and the galleries were damaged. None of the artworks was damaged.

To enhance the viewing of the artworks, when the Mitchell Gallery first opened the rooms were lit with lantern lights and the walls of the Dixson Gallery were painted in a ‘restful brownish-grey’.

The large Mitchell Gallery One, the pictures gallery, was officially opened on Tuesday 8 March 1910 and is part of the original Mitchell building. Sir William Dixson was invited to this opening, which was presided over by the governor of NSW Lord Chelmsford. Lord Chelmsford said at the opening:

You can touch and handle things here which, if they did not exist, would have meant that Australian History would have to have been written in a different way …. So we ought to value this library as the relics of our national existence – part of ourselves – and give it the very highest reverence we can.*

Footnotes
_{One Hundred: a Tribute to the Mitchell Library, 2010, p 3}

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