Manchester Art Gallery
The Manchester Art Gallery is a public art museum in Manchester . It emerged from the Royal Manchester Institution founded in 1823 and is located in three interconnected buildings in the city center. The collection consists mainly of European art with an emphasis on works by English artists. There is also an extensive collection of handicrafts. In addition, the museum has numerous exhibits on fashion history, which are on display in the Platt Hall mansion south of the city .
history
The Industrial Revolution brought about a rapidly expanding economy and a rapidly growing population in Manchester. To promote culture in the city, merchants in particular founded the Royal Manchester Institution on October 1, 1823 . This society held exhibitions and soon began building its own art collection. In 1824 the architect Charles Barry was commissioned to design a building for the company on Mosley Street in Manchester city center. The building in the style of classicism ( neoclassicism ) was opened in 1835. The building is now a listed building and is classified in the Grade I category as an extremely important building. In 1882 the building and the collection passed into the hands of the city and were initially called the City Art Gallery of Manchester until they were renamed to what it is today.
In 1918 the City of Manchester took over the Manchester Art Museum, founded by Thomas Horsfall in 1877 . Located in the Ancoats Hall estate, the museum housed paintings, handicrafts, and natural history objects from Horsfall's private collection. The museum closed in 19563 and the art objects became the property of the Manchester Art Gallery. Additional buildings were also used for the museum's ever-growing collections. These included the Queen's Park Art Gallery in Harpuhey , the Fletcher Moss Museum in Didsbury , and the mansions Heaton Hall and Wythenshawe Hall . The Platt Hall estate is still used today as an exhibition center for the fashion and textiles collection.
In 1938 the city acquired the Manchester Athenaeum , a society for the advancement of science, next to the Manchester Art Gallery to expand the museum . This building from 1837, also designed by Charles Barry, is stylistically based on the architecture of Italian Renaissance palaces . In 2002, a new building designed by Michael Hopkins was added to the two buildings from the 19th century.
collection
The focus of the collection is on European and in particular on English art from the baroque to the present day. In addition, there are individual objects from antiquity through Asian handicrafts to collectibles from Africa. For example, the museum has ancient Egyptian clay pots and bronzes, Greek ceramics from pre-Christian times, Chinese pottery from the Han dynasty to the Qing dynasty , Japanese armor from the Azuchi Momoyama period , prints by Katsushika Hokusai and Indian daggers. The collection contains coins from the Kingdom of Mercia from Europe and various handicrafts such as Italian majolica , Meissen porcelain , English silver work, old furniture, clocks and musical instruments. The museum at the Platt Hall country estate shows the extensive collection of clothing and fashion accessories .
The museum's art collection includes more than 2,000 paintings, 3,000 watercolors and drawings, 250 sculptures and around 1,000 prints. The collection of Italian paintings includes the Adoration of the Shepherds by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio , the Flight into Egypt by Alessandro Turchi , the view of the courtyard of Königstein Castle from the west by Bernardo Bellotto and the depictions of Saints John the Baptist by Giovanni Battista Gaulli and St. Catherine of Guido Reni . Dutch Baroque painting is represented by the works The Awakening of Lazarus by Abraham Bloemaert , the portrait of Hendrick Casimir by Gerard ter Borch , the Still Life with Fruits and Wine Glass by Willem Kalf and the landscape paintings A storm on the Dutch coast by Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael and winter scene with a sledge in the foreground by Jan van Goyen .
The museum owns the portrait of Miss Cornelia Knight from the Swiss-born Angelika Kauffmann . French paintings in the collection include Le galant pêcheur by François Boucher and Landscape with the Adoration of the Golden Calf by Claude Lorrain . From the second half of the 19th century, the museum shows a self-portrait by Henri Fantin-Latour , Dorfstrasse, Louveciennes and Le Pont de la Clef à Bruges, Belgique by Camille Pissarro and The Port of Dieppe by Paul Gauguin . The works of Ville Petrifée by Max Ernst , who temporarily lived in France, date from the 20th century , the cubist painting Peinture by Fernand Léger and the painting The Artist's Mother by the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti .
George Stubbs:
Cheetah and Stag with Two Indians
William Turner:
Thomson's Aeolian Harp
Dante Gabriel Rossetti:
Astarte Syriaca
Edward Burne-Jones:
Sibylla Delphica
James Tissot:
Hush!
The rich inventory of English painting includes works from the Baroque era such as the group portrait Sir John Cotton and his Family by Peter Lely , the portrait of Charles, 9th Earl Cathcart by Joshua Reynolds , the depiction A Peasant Girl gathering fagots in a wood by Thomas Gainsborough and the colonial motif Cheetah and Stag with Two Indians by George Stubbs . Works such as the landscape motifs Thomson's Aeolian Harp by William Turner and Hamstead Heath looking towards Harrow by John Constable date from the beginning of the 19th century . The painting of the Pre-Raphaelites is represented in the collection with a number of works. These include the biblical motif The Hireling Shephard by William Holman Hunt , the depiction of the work entitled Work by Ford Madox Brown , the group portrait Autumn Leaves by John Everett Millais and the depictions of women Astarte Syriaca by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Sibylla Delphica by Edward Burne- Jones . Other works from the Victorian era include the antiquity-oriented paintings Captive Andromache by Frederic Leighton , Hylas and the Nymphs by John William Waterhouse and Silver Favorites by Lawrence Alma-Tadema . In the painting Hush! shows James Tissot a representation of the English upper class from 1875.
At the beginning of the 20th century, English painting was clearly under the influence of the French impressionist artists. Examples in the museum are the pictures Hommage to Manet by William Orpen or the portrait of Victor Lecour by Walter Sickert . The sculptures Doves by Barbara Hepworth and Mother and Child by Henry Moore and the cubist painting Au chat botté by Ben Nicholson date from the period between the two world wars . The portraits Girl with Beret by Lucian Freud and Portrait of Henrietta Morares on a blue couch by Francis Bacon were created after 1945 .
literature
- Manchester City Art Gallery (Ed.): A Century of Collecting 1882-1982 . South Light Press, Manchester 1983.
Web links
Coordinates: 53 ° 28 ′ 43.6 " N , 2 ° 14 ′ 29.9" W.