At the Fortress of Bard a selection of 64 works of extraordinary artistic value are on display, coming from the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the most important art museum on the African continent. The collection as a whole has more than one hundred works, including oil paintings, watercolors and graphics, which bear the signature of some of the greatest masters of the international art scene between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Degas to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, from Corot to Boudin and Courbet, from Monet to Van Gogh, from Mancini to Signac, from Picasso to Bacon, Liechtenstein and Warhol, up to the most recent protagonists of the South African artistic panorama, first among all, William Kentridge. An unexpected series of masterpieces that allows you to take a real journey through the history of 19th and 20th-century art, ranging over Europe to the United States, all the way to South Africa.

The collection was opened to the public in 1910; the Johannesburg Art Gallery is the most important art museum on the African continent and it houses a collection of the highest quality. The prominent figure in the birth and formation of the collection was Lady Florence Philips. Born in Cape Town in 1863, she moved to Johannesburg after her marriage to Sir Lionel Philips, a tycoon of the mining industry. The gallery, financed with investments by her husband and some other tycoons, was created with the aim of providing her city with an art museum, convinced that she wanted to transform what was at the time a mining center into a city created on the model of a European capital. The birth of a public art gallery would also be an opportunity for the cultural growth of the entire population as well as a factor of prestige for local high society.