SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA.- The exhibition Love & Death: Art In The Age Of Queen Victoria, which recently opened at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is a project which poses many questions about the Victorian era and its relevance to society today One of the most important images in this exhibition is Ford Madox Brown's Chaucer at the Court of Edward III, 1851 - which is also the largest. Brown's painting was a public statement, a manifesto, really, fastidiously researched, laboriously executed and intended to make his reputation. Angus Trumble, former curator of European art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, spent four years organizing both the exhibition and its catalogue. Exploiting the wealth of high Victorian paintings held as a gaudy residue of empire in Australian and New Zealand collections, he combined two primary groups of works from Adelaide and Sydney with numerous individual museum loans, plus a tranche of formidable imports from the John and Julie Schaeffer Collection. The result is variously thrilling, alarming, moving, bombastic, instructive, sexy, sick and strange, a mirror of Victorian visual culture, in other words. It includes classical pastiches by famous academic virtuosi such as Edward Poynter, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, J.W.Waterhouse and especially Frederick Leighton; realist vignettes by painters of everyday life such as Thomas Faed, J.C.Dollman and Blandford Fletcher; society commentaries by W.P.Frith, John Everett Millais, William Quiller Orchardson and G.E.Hicksby; primitivist reprises by Edward Burne-Jones and Roddam Spencer Stanhope; Pre-Raphaelite spectacles by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt; and a few formulaic landscapes in full Ye Olde Englande mode by Thomas Creswick, John Linnell and Benjamin Williams Leader. Love & Death: Art in the Age of Queen Victoria remains on view until May 12.