National Gallery of VictoriaIn the 1950s and 60s, artists, writers and musicians were drawn to the islands in the Aegean, including Australian writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift, who took up residence on the Greek island of Hydra, as did the young Leonard Cohen. In 1962, Melbourne-born Australian artist Leonard French spent six months on Samos, with his wife Helen, his son Marc, and me, then just a baby. While there, a fortune teller told him he would “decorate the heavens”. It proved to be an apt prediction, and became a much-retold family story. In 1968, the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) opened on St Kilda Road with my father’s monumental stained-glass ceiling illuminating its Great Hall. He had created what is still believed to be “the world’s largest cut-glass ceiling”. The heavens had, indeed, been decorated. One of my childhood memories is of my father laying out the thick pieces of glass on vast glowing light boxes, then adding sawdust in between the glass to see the effect. I also recall visiting the Great Hall while the ceiling was being constructed, and later lying on the floor beside him, gazing up at his work: the giant turtles at either end, surrounded by birds and partly obscured serpents, all facing a massive sun at its centre. Leonard French’s ceiling work for the National Gallery of Victoria’s Great Hall. National Gallery of Victoria The NGV has just installed another work by my late father at the Ian Potter Centre, its Australian art museum at Federation Square. I had not seen it before, and coming face to face with it for the first time was thrilling; it is spectacular! To view it, visitors ride the escalator to the right of the gallery entrance and slowly approach the work. It looks so perfect there, one could imagine it was commissioned for that space.A key to deciphering a masterpieceIt proves to be a fabulous companion to the original NGV commission. Able to be seen close up, this window provides visitors with something unexpected: a key to deciphering the imagery of French’s Great Hall ceiling, one of Australia’s most familiar, yet surprisingly little-interrogated, artworks. The newly installed Leonard French window at NGV Australia. Eugene Hyland/National Gallery of Victoria At the top of the new window is a figure with outstretched hands reaching to a blue sky. Beneath each arm, three birds fly upwards, signifying renewal. The water, which is teeming with life, has a giant brightly coloured fish swimming in a turquoise sea, and a massive royal blue serpent with a vivid red eye, sliding upwards towards the figure. At the bottom, three turtles surge forward. The exhilarating upward movement of the composition is beautiful and joyous. Each of the motifs in the new window recur throughout French’s work. Here, the progression from turtles (land), through the fish (water), to birds (sky), give the work a powerful sense of regeneration and ascent, a spiritual and natural completeness.From private home to public galleryBy the 1960s, Leonard French had achieved a degree of celebrity unusual for an Australian visual artist of the period. He appeared on the cover of The Bulletin in June 1967 and Life (Australia) in August 1968, and received a number of high profile public commissions, including the Alpha and Omega window at Monash University. Growing up, I was aware of his fame.NGV Australia’s window was originally commissioned by the late businessman and entrepreneur Gordon Barton for his private home. It was the largest of several windows my father created for the house, which he referred to collectively as “Gordon Barton’s windows” (here I will refer to NGV Australia’s work as the Barton window).According to my father, Barton had admired his stained-glass windows at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, and commissioned him through architect Michael Dysart to create windows for his new home in Vaucluse, Sydney. The NGV’s window was originally commissioned for the stairwell, where it was installed around 1972. In 2020, the Barton window, which had been removed from the house by subsequent owners, was offered for private sale by Leonard Joel auction house, where it was purchased by a philanthropist, who later donated it to the NGV.Conservation has included removing white paint that had covered areas around the glass, allowing French’s original composition and the extraordinary luminosity of the glass to be seen again. I am delighted that the window, more than half a century after it was created, has been placed on public view.The Barton window has found a particularly fitting home at NGV Australia. The Great Hall ceiling is one of the museum’s most recognisable works, yet its distance from the viewer can make the imagery of turtles, serpents, fish and birds difficult to discern.I have lived with my father’s images all my life, but for many viewers these creatures are hidden in what can appear to be geometric abstraction. The Barton window offers a new way into his visual world.Lisa French is one of the daughters of Leonard French.