The Art Gallery of NSW yesterday announced a bequest estimated at between $7 million and $8 million from the woman who director Edmund Capon described as the gallery’s plain-speaking and visionary “fruitful anarchist", Mollie Gowing.

The bequest – an acquisition endowment of $5 million, together with 142 works that include paintings by Emily Kam Ngwarray, Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri, John Olsen, Arthur Boyd and Ian Fairweather – was made unconditionally by Ms Gowing, who died aged 94 in 2009.