Art Gallery of New South Wales audio guide,
five stops, free.

Most people notice the dog before the knight, and that is the point. A bloodhound sits upright on the floor beside a low bed, both forepaws on the stone floor and its whole attention on the face above it, while the knight's bare hand hangs over the edge of the bed just above its muzzle. The man in armour lies flat under a blue coverlet embroidered with flowers, and across his breastplate someone has laid a wreath. That wreath is the only thing telling you he is dead. Without it this would be a dog waiting for its master to wake up. With it, the dog is keeping vigil, and the title tells you the rest. Requiescat is Latin, the start of a prayer for the dead: may he rest.

Briton Rivière painted it in 1888 and signed it in black in the lower left corner, with the date split around his initials, 18 BR 88. He had started out at the Royal Academy in London painting history subjects, the Spanish Armada, Romeo and Juliet, and then in 1865 he painted a sleeping deerhound and more or less never went back. Animals occupied the rest of his life. He said you could never paint a dog unless you were fond of it, though he admitted he had grown tired of having them about the house. He never worked without a man who knew animals standing by, and he drew dead ones too, in the dissecting rooms of the Zoological Gardens, so that the anatomy under the fur would be right. Look at the hound's back legs and the hang of its ears and you can see the homework.

The painting travelled a long way before it got here. It hung at the Royal Academy in 1888, then crossed to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, came south to the Tasmanian International Exhibition in Hobart in 1894, and went to Berlin in 1896. Two years later the Gallery bought it directly from the artist, and the credit line still reads Purchased 1897 to 98. Around the same time Rivière stood for President of the Royal Academy and was narrowly defeated. He went back to his dogs.

It is, by a wide margin, the picture people look up most from this collection, and standing here you can see why. There is no story to decode, no mythology to know. A dog is waiting for someone who is not coming back.

Before you move on, the Gallery owns his small oil study for this very dog, and a second Rivière hangs in these same courts, a painting from the year before called Compulsory education. The title alone tells you it has a dog in it.

The light is the first thing. The sun has already gone down behind you, and everything in this three-metre canvas is lit by its afterglow: the copper-coloured drapery, the bark of the tree, the woman's hair. Look at the horizon, between the trunk and the man in red. There is the merest lip of a moon coming up over the sea. Leighton chose that moment on purpose. Boccaccio, whose story this is, set it in spring, in the afternoon. Leighton moved it to an autumn dusk, because he wanted the drowsiness of the end of a long hot day, and he wanted the whole picture to feel like the minute before sleep.

The story comes from the Decameron. A well-born young man is so brutish that people call him Cymon, which means beast. One day he comes upon Iphigenia asleep in the woods, and the sight of her transforms him. He falls in love, and becomes a devotee of beauty and philosophy. So the young man in red at the far right is not admiring her. He is being changed by her, and he is the only person awake. Her servants are asleep, the child is asleep, even the dog is asleep.

The woman is Dorothy Dene, born Ada Alice Pullen, an actress who became Leighton's favourite model and sat for Flaming June among many others. A story that went around in 1897 says he spent six months searching Europe for a face to match his idea of Iphigenia and finally found her in a London theatre. His biographer tells a duller version, that he spotted her on the doorstep of a neighbouring studio. Either way, her younger sister Lena is here too: she is the sleeping child in the lower right. When Leighton died he left Dene five thousand pounds, and another five thousand in trust for her and her sisters, the largest bequest he made. People have speculated that Bernard Shaw had the two of them in mind when he wrote Pygmalion.

The picture took eight months, and about fifty-six preparatory drawings survive. It was shown at the Royal Academy in 1884, then in Berlin, Dresden and Vienna, and passed through a series of English collectors before the Gallery bought it at Christie's in London on 13 February 1976. Leighton himself was President of the Royal Academy for eighteen years and the first painter ever made a peer. The patent creating him Baron Leighton was issued on 24 January 1896. He died the next day, and the peerage died with him: it lasted one day, the shortest in history.

He never signed this painting. Look for a name in the corners and you will not find one.

You are looking into the sun. It is just up, somewhere behind the big tree and the farmhouse, and it is throwing the shadows of a handful of cows and a man straight at your feet across a paddock white with frost. The Gallery's own curators call this perhaps the most loved Australian landscape painting in the building, and the reason is standing right here in the foreground: that light.

This is a dairy farm at Emu Plains, west of Sydney. The farm belonged to Isaac Innes and then to his son Jim, and the man opening the gate is Jim Innes with his own cattle. Elioth Gruner had been coming out here since 1915 to paint the early morning, and he had already won the Wynne Prize in 1916 with a picture of the same farm called Morning light. This one won it again in 1919.

He painted it outdoors, mostly, in the cold, and at a size he almost never worked at. He built a shelter on the spot to keep the weather off the canvas and wrapped his legs in chaff bags against frostbite. The Gallery thinks he finished parts of it later in his studio in the city.

Now get close. The frost and the grass are not painted so much as dabbed, short strokes of paint that turn into long blue shadows when you step back. Each cow has a thin outline of white and gold where the sun catches its back. And look at the farmer's ears. The light is coming straight through them, and Gruner has painted them translucent pink. That is the whole picture in two small brushstrokes: a man with the sun behind him on a cold morning.

Gruner had no business being a painter at all. He was born in Gisborne, New Zealand, in 1882 and brought to Sydney before he was a year old. At fourteen, after his father died, he went to work as a draper's assistant, twelve-hour days, and took Julian Ashton's art classes at night. He did not give up the drapery business until he was thirty. He went on to win the Wynne Prize seven times, more than anyone except Hans Heysen, and Norman Lindsay said he painted the purest light that had ever been seen on a bit of canvas.

The painting came to the Gallery as a gift from F G White in 1939, the year Gruner died. He signed it in black in the lower right corner, E Gruner, 1919. It weighs thirty-six kilograms in its frame, which is a lot of weight for a picture of frost.