Alfred Felton, bachelor who lived for many years in boarding houses of one kind or another, might seem a familiar Victorian figure, particularly in a colony where there were not enough women to go around. But Felton was a bachelor with a difference. In the first place, as the co-founder of the prosperous drughouse Felton, Grimwade and Co., he was a colonial success story. He also had interests beyond business. His rooms at the Esplanade Hotel in St Kilda, where he spent his last years, were crammed with paintings, books and objects; some splendid, recently unearthed photographs document this ‘obsessive profusion’, as John Poynter describes it.

Felton’s friends and colleagues might have dismissed his compulsive collecting as the harmless eccentricity of a wealthy man. His will, therefore, came as a considerable surprise. Having no direct descendants to provide for, Felton directed that the bulk of his estate should pass to a trust, half the income of which was to be devoted to ‘charitable objects’, the other half to ‘the purchase of works of art’ for ‘the Melbourne National Art Gallery’. This latter provision, formally known as the Felton Bequest, enabled the National Gallery of Victoria (now marketing itself under the twin labels of NGV International and NGV Australia) to become, in Patrick McCaughey’s words, ‘the first encyclopedic collection of art in Australia’.