Browse Items (60 total)

Paris-based Australian painter, Rupert Bunny, was commissioned by Percy Grainger to paint this portrait in the first few years of the young musician’s professional career. Bunny depicted Grainger holding a sheet of music and focussed attention on his…

Ernest Thesiger was one of the closest of the many artist and musician friends that Grainger made, especially in the first decades of his career. Thesiger was an aspiring painter when he made this drawing, and later became a stage and film actor.…

Grainger’s charisma, captured in many photographic studio portraits, helped to launch and sustain his performance career. This photograph was taken by Hana Studios, London, which specialised in theatrical photography.

Rose entrusted Melba with the secret of her own illness from syphilis. A month after writing to Percy about his father, Melba wrote, ‘I have received your letter & also read your Mother’s letter to Bella. I am so sorry for her & so humiliated that…

Henry Walter Barnett created this elegant, full-length portrait of Melba at the height of her fame. Among her many achievements in this period, Melba established a significant professional partnership with leading tenor, Enrico Caruso. They first…

This promotional photograph shows Grainger holding his ‘English Dance’, which had been composed and scored between 1899 and 1909, and finally published in March 1929. The photograph, taken by family friend Frederick Morse, includes in the background…