The Art Library has been the beneficiary of several gifts over the years and has now grown to the point where parts of the collection that do not need to be on open access have been moved to the Art Fellow’s studio, where they can be consulted by appointment. In 2021, the Library received a generous gift from the estate of the late Eva Breuer, a prominent art dealer in Sydney, whose sons had attended Grammar. These books, mostly monographs on important Australian artists of the twentieth century, have significantly enhanced our coverage of this period, and have already led to a reorganisation of the Library to give greater prominence to Australian art history.
The Library is available to boys in Forms V and VI (especially Art and Classics pupils), and as a number of senior boys have discovered, it is in fact the quietest and most comfortable environment at College Street for research or writing.
The other Library is a much more recent initiative. A school like ours has many old books, some from the original school library in the nineteenth century, and others that belonged to notable headmasters and other masters. The Banjo Paterson Library, however, has never had a rare book section, and in practice these books have mostly accumulated in the studies of the Headmaster and the Master of the Lower School, while others were scattered in the Classics Department and elsewhere. “A school like ours has many old books, some from the original school library in the nineteenth century, and others that belonged to notable headmasters and other masters.”
