Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery facts for kids
Edwardian Baroque architecture of the museum
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| Established | 1910 |
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| Location | Plymouth, Devon, England |
| Type | Art museum and history museum |
Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery in the Drake Circus area of Plymouth, Devon, England was built in 1907–1910 by Thornely and Rooke in Edwardian Baroque style. The building closed in late 2016. Along with the former Central Library building and St Luke's Church on Tavistock Place, it has since been redeveloped into The Box, Plymouth. This new museum, gallery and archive opened in 2020 housing a collection of about 2 million items.
Collections
The Museum's collections encompass fine and decorative arts, natural history and human history. The natural history collection consists of over 150,000 specimens and an historic natural history library and archive. Many prehistoric artefacts from Dartmoor, important Bronze Age and Iron Age material from Mount Batten and medieval and post-medieval finds from Plymouth are found in the human history collection alongside artifacts from ancient Egypt and other ancient cultures of Europe and the Middle East.
The art collections include 750 easel paintings, over 3,000 watercolours and drawings, at least 5,000 prints and a sizeable collection of sculptures. A large proportion of the art was donated to the people of Plymouth in 1852 by William Cotton (1794–1863) and is known as the Cottonian Collection. It had been put together principally by the collector Charles Rogers (1711–1784), and includes works by Sir Joshua Reynolds who was born locally.
The collections also include work by artists of the 19th-century Newlyn School, the influential 20th-century St. Ives group of painters, and the Camden Town Group. Other artists represented are Edgar Degas, Edward Burne-Jones, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, John William Waterhouse, Claude Lorrain, Terry Frost, J M W Turner, John Brett, John Everett Millais, Ambrose Bowden Johns, Benjamin Robert Haydon, James Northcote and Samuel Prout. The latter four painters were born locally.
Funding
The Museum and Art Gallery was owned and operated by Plymouth City Council. It also received operational funding from Arts Council England through its Major Partner Museums scheme.
Additional grants for specific projects, acquisitions and conservation duties came from funding bodies such as the Heritage Lottery Fund, The Art Fund, the Wolfson Foundation and the V&A Purchase Grant Fund.
