The gallery was first established in 1910, operating from the premises of what is today's Wits University. The collection was subsequently moved to Joubert Park where it remains to this day. The building housing the museum was first designed by Edwin Lutyens, a renowned British architect, in 1911, but it was not until 1915 that construction on the site was completed under the supervision of Robert Howden, a South African architect.
Side wings were added to the building some time in 1940. The building was further extended in 1986, when the north wing was upgraded and renovated.
Today, the gallery is a national monument housed in a three-storey building boasting 15 exhibition halls and some sculpture gardens on the grounds of Joubert Park. Its location in the park initially made the gallery easily accessible to the public. The park has over the past decade or so become more menacing than homely, attracting to its lawns, hordes of the unemployed and the mischievous, to whom artistic appreciation is an abstract, even alien concept. This environment has become less welcoming to some art lovers.
The entrance to the gallery ushers you into the Phillips Gallery, named after Florence Phillips, an art collector who established the first gallery collection using funds donated by her husband, Lionel Phillips, a mining magnate.
The initial collection was put together by Sir Hugh Lane. The term avant-garde has been used, not without reason, to describe this original collection, which was exhibited in London in 1910, before being brought to South Africa. This foundation collection consists largely of 19th century and contemporary British and other European art.
