Museums and important
art collections in the UK
The British Museum
The British Museum, in the Bloomsbury area of London,
United Kingdom, is a public institution dedicated to human
history, art and culture.
The British Museum was established in 1753, largely based
on the collections of the Irish physician and scientist Sir Hans
Sloane.
1. "An Elephant" by
Rembrandt
2. "Dancers Practicing at the Barre" by Edgar
Degas
3. "London from Hampstead, with a double
rainbow"
by John Constable
The National Gallery
The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in
the City of Westminster, in Central London. Founded in 1824, it
houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid13th century to 1900.
1. "The Arnolfini
Portrait" by Jan
van Eyck
2. "Virgin Mary" by
Giovanni Battista
Salvi
3. "Fifteen
Sunflowers in
Vase" by Vincent
van Gogh
The National Portrait Gallery
The National Portrait Gallery is
an art gallery in London housing
a collection of portraits of
historically important and
famous British people. It was the
first portrait gallery in the world
when it opened in 1856. The
gallery moved in 1896 to its
current site at St Martin's Place,
off Trafalgar Square, and
adjoining the National Gallery.
The
Tudors
The Tate Gallery
Tate galleries, art museums in the United
Kingdom that house the national collection of
British art from the 16th century and the national
collection of modern art. There are four branches:
the Tate Britain and Tate Modern in London,
the Tate Liverpool, and the Tate St. Ives
in Cornwall.
Tate Britain
Tate Britain, known from 1897 to 1932 as the National Gallery of
British Art and from 1932 to 2000 as the Tate Gallery, is an art
museum on Millbank in the City of Westminster in London. It is
part of the Tate network of galleries in England, with Tate
Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is the oldest gallery in
the network, having opened in 1897. It houses a substantial
collection of the art of the United Kingdom since Tudor times,
and in particular has large holdings of the works of J. M. W.
Turner, who bequeathed all his own collection to the nation. It is
one of the largest museums in the country.
Tate Liverpool
Tate Liverpool is an art gallery and museum in Liverpool. The
museum was an initiative of the Merseyside Development
Corporation. Tate Liverpool was created to display work from
the Tate Collection which comprises the national collection of
British art from the year 1500 to the present day, and
international modern art. The gallery also has a programme of
temporary exhibitions. Until 2003, Tate Liverpool was the
largest gallery of modern and contemporary art in the UK
outside London.
Tate St. Ives
Tate St Ives is an art gallery in St Ives, Cornwall, England,
exhibiting work by modern British artists with links to the St Ives
area.
In 1980, Tate group started to manage the Barbara Hepworth
Museum and Sculpture Garden, dedicated to a St Ives artist
closely linked with Henry Moore. The group decided to open a
museum in the town, to showcase local artists, especially those
already held in their collection.
The Tate St Ives was built between 1988 and 1993 on the site of
an old gasworks. In 2015, it received funding for an expansion,
doubling the size of the gallery, and closed in October 2015 for
Tate Modern
Tate Modern is a modern art gallery located in London. It is Britain's
national gallery of international modern art and forms part of the Tate
group. It is based in the former Bankside Power Station, in the Bankside
area of the London Borough of Southwark. Tate holds the national
collection of British art from 1900 to the present day and international
modern and contemporary art.Tate Modern is one of the largest museums
of modern and contemporary art in the world. As with the UK's other
national galleries and museums, there is no admission charge for access
to the collection displays, which take up the majority of the gallery space,
while tickets must be purchased for the major temporary exhibitions. The
gallery is a highly visited museum, with 5.9 million visitors in 2018,
making it the sixth-most visited art museum in the world, and the most
visited in Britain.
Tate Online
Tate Online provides a wide variety of information about the
physical galleries including events, directions to the gallery,
personnel and on-site shops and services. The gallery sites attract
large numbers of visitors annually from around the world, serving
as popular tourist attractions. The Tate holds a large collection of
works, the galleries publicly displaying some of the more popular
exhibits. Much of the content from the Tate is available online;
especially the collection and more people visit Tate Online than
the physical gallery itself. Entry to the Tate is free but income is
generated from charging for access to certain exhibitions,
membership fees, and shops and restaurants. One of the purposes
of Tate Online is to generate revenue by attracting visitors to the
Tate galleries
The Victoria and Albert Museum
Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) is the finest museum
of the decorative arts in the world. Its collections, housed
in magnificent Victorian buildings, include sculpture,
furniture, fashion and textiles, paintings, silver, glass,
jewellery, books from Britain and all over the world. The
Museum was opened in 1857 at Marlborough House
Additional buildings were designed by Sir Aston Webb.
The foundation stone was laid by Queen Victoria in 1899
and the Museum re-opened, in 1909 as the V&A.
The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford
Founded in 1683, the Ashmolean is the University of Oxford’s museum of
art and archaeology. From ancient Egyptian artefacts to contemporary art,
the collection spans thousands of years of human civilization. The museum
claims to hold the world’s greatest collection of Raphael drawings and the
most important collection of Egyptian pre-Dynastic sculpture outside Cairo,
as well as the foremost collection of modern Chinese painting in the
Western world. The museum’s collection is founded upon the University Art
Collection, originally housed in the Upper Reading Room in the Bodleian
Library, and the collection of "miscellaneous curiosities" belonging to John
Tradescant the elder which later passed to Elias Ashmole who insisted it
should be displayed in a purpose-built museum.
The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge
The Fitzwilliam Museum is the art and antiquities museum of the
University of Cambridge. It is located on Trumpington Street opposite
Fitzwilliam Street in central Cambridge. It was founded in 1816 under the
will of Richard FitzWilliam, 7th Viscount FitzWilliam (1745-1816), and
comprises one of the best collections of antiquities and modern art in
western Europe. With over half a million objects and artworks in its
collections, the displays in the Museum explore world history and art
from antiquity to the present. The treasures of the museum include
artworks by Monet, Picasso, Rubens, Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt,
Cézanne, Van Dyck, and Canaletto, as well as a winged bas-relief from
Nimrud. Admission to the public is always free.
Established
1816, by Richard
FitzWilliam,
7th Viscount
FitzWilliam
The National Gallery of Scotland
The Scottish National Gallery (formerly the National Gallery of
Scotland) is the national art gallery of Scotland. It is located on
The Mound in central Edinburgh, close to Princes Street. The
building was designed in a neoclassical style by William Henry
Playfair, and first opened to the public in 1859. The Scottish
National Gallery is run by National Galleries of Scotland, a
public body that also owns the Scottish National Gallery of
Modern Art and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
Established 1859; 161 years ago
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BM&AG) is a museum and art
gallery in Birmingham, England. It has a collection of international
importance covering fine art, ceramics, metalwork, jewellery, natural
history, archaeology, ethnography, local history and industrial history.
The museum/gallery is run by Birmingham Museums Trust, the largest
independent museums trust in the United Kingdom, which also runs
eight other museums around the city. Entrance to the Museum and
Art Gallery is free, but some major exhibitions in the Gas Hall incur an
entrance fee.
Established
28 November
1885