What should an Australian museum collect? How should permanent collections affect exhibition policy? Who should decide what to buy? These are three provocative questions raised by the current survey of English art over several centuries at the Art Gallery of South Australia, an exhibition drawn exclusively from its permanent collection.

From the third decade of the nineteenth century, British art was collected in Adelaide and, with the establishment of the Adelaide gallery in 1881, found its way into the public domain. From 1980, when he became a curator at Adelaide (he was appointed Director in 1991), Ron Radford built on the gallery’s collection. His exhibition opens with a version of Hans Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII and concludes with a lurid but wonderful pastel-coloured painting by Holman Hunt of the Resurrection, Christ and the Two Marys. What is immediately impressive is the range and quality of the collection. Radford’s catalogue is the first serious account of the gallery’s pictures. It is sumptuously illustrated and intensively researched. Instead of the razzmatazz of an expensive loan exhibition from some remote part of the world, here is an exhibition which seriously re-presents the gallery’s own collection. What a welcome novelty to study the permanent collection. So few galleries do this in Australia.