In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make; that he can befog or destroy, but that he cannot sustain. — Hilaire Belloc

The Art Gallery of New South Wales’ collection is one of the finest in Australia, and the roughly one and a half million visitors that come to gaze at its works each year, come to gaze primarily at the wealth of Australian impressionists, European classicists, romantic landscapes and more on display in the grand halls of the classical Walter Liberty Vernon designed building. 

Yet those quaint, unenlightened visitors who hoped to be elevated by...