Born in New Zealand as Reginald Nan Kivell, he was illegitimate, gay, modestly educated and had an inglorious military record during the Great War. He fled New Zealand late in 1916 and reinvented himself in England as Rex de Charembac Nan Kivell Esq., of noble stock and part of the heroic pioneers in the Canterbury area of New Zealand. To legitimise his story he started to busily collect images of these noble pioneers.

As the director of London's Redfern Gallery his financial resources grew to fuel his collecting mania. Nat Williams, the curator of this exhibition and the author of the excellent catalogue, has calculated that Nan Kivell averaged out about two acquisitions a day for 60 years. That was quite a collecting habit! Fortunately, his collecting obsession grew considerably beyond smiling settlers and contented cows on New Zealand's south island and covered everything to do with Australasia. He created the one of the most significant collection of art, manuscripts, maps, books and artefacts dealing with colonial Australia and New Zealand ever assembled, measured in the tens of thousands of items. Through the skilful footwork of the National Library's inspirational Librarian, Sir Harold White, the collection was in part acquired and in part donated by Nan Kivell to Canberra.

Nan Kivell himself never set foot in Australia nor did he ever again visited New Zealand. Nat Williams speculates "This reinvention also meant that he could never risk returning to New Zealand and being unmasked, despite entreaties over decades to visit as a guest of the government. Nor did he visit Australia, gently declining numerous requests from Prime Minister Menzies and Harold White." This entertaining, psychoanalytical account of Nan Kivell dovetails nicely into the main theme of this exhibition, Nan Kivell's 'opus terribilis' The famous and infamous of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, 1492-1970. It is a book that Nan Kivell obsessed over for more than 20 years and was finally published at enormous expense in 1974. It is eccentric, close to unusable and documents almost five centuries of famous and infamous figures of the region. Arranged alphabetically, it brings together portraits from Abba Thulle, King of Pelew, to Rev. J.H.L. Zillman in Ipswich in Queensland and of course includes himself. The portraits themselves are drawn from the Nan Kivell collection and it is a selection of these that forms the backbone of the exhibition.

It is a kaleidoscope of our history and the history of our region related in terms of portraits and contains everything from William Shakespeare, King George III and the prison reformer Mrs Elizabeth Fry. Sometimes you need a particularly long bow to tie the portraits into an account of Australasia and the Pacific, for example, Shakespeare. Nat Williams explains that in Christchurch, where Nan Kivell spent his youth, flows the River Avon, hence the link with Shakespeare's birthplace Stratford-upon-Avon. Nan Kivell claimed that it was one of his illustrious forbearers, Robert Roger Nan Kivell surveyed the region and named the river. In fact it was a surveyor named Nankivell, who named the river after a river in Ayrshire in Scotland, but our patron never let facts stand in the way of a good story.

It may be a heavily culturally encoded exhibition with numerous references back to idiosyncrasies of this particular collector, but it also contains some great colonial images. Two of my long term favourites are by Augustus Earle, one a self-portrait of himself marooned on Tristan d'Acunha with his faithful dog Jemmy (1824), the other a sympathetic portrait of Desmond, a N.S. Wales chief painted for a karobbery or native dance (c.1826). The watercolour version of the well known oil painting by Jerry Barrett, Mrs Fry reading to prisoners in Newgate in the year 1816 (1863) is a lovely Dickensian image of the great social reformer at work. I cannot recall having seen this watercolour rendition before.

A lovely discovery in this exhibition is a painting by a certain M. Jilt with the possible title of North Australian Aborigine (c.1890). Again it is a painting which is virtually unknown and Nat Williams speculates that it is based on a Foelsche photograph and is possibly executed in England. It is a striking and unusual work and a wonderful enigma to be resolved by some one working on colonial images of Indigenous peoples.

Thank God that Rex Nan Kivell was not a well-adjusted and urbane gallery dealer preoccupied with status symbols. His quirkiness made him into one of the great benefactors for Australian colonial art.

Portraits of the famous and infamous – Sir Rex Nan Kivell's collection, National Library of Australia, Closes December 13, daily 10am-5pm.