Fine art - museum collection

What is on display?

We have seven fine art galleries at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, displaying our paintings and sculpture from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Our art collection covers a wide field, featuring internationally renowned artists from Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) to Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), from Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) to Howard Hodgkin (b.1932), as well as our own Bristol School artists working in the city in the 1820s.

French Art

This gallery features paintings by French artists and includes work by Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) and Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919).
This gallery is currently closed due to works to install a new lift.

European Art 1300 to 1750

This gallery is where we show our Old Master Italian and Dutch paintings, including pictures by Giovanni Bellini (ca1430-1516) and Bernardo Bellotto (1720-1780). Look for the huge painting of Noah's Ark by Dutch artist Jan Griffier the Elder (1646-1718).

British Art

You will find a selection of British paintings from 17th century portraiture to 19th century Romantic landscapes, including Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830) and Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-1828).

Modern Art

See our broad ranging Modern British collection, from David Bomberg (1890-1957), Ben Nicholson (1894-1982), and Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975) to David Nash (b. 1945).

Victorian Art

This gallery displays 19th century British paintings including Pre-Raphaelites Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833-1898) and Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896) and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912).

Bristol School of Artists

This gallery is devoted to the Bristol School of Artists and our silver collection, and includes paintings by Francis Danby (1793-1861), Samuel Jackson (1794-1869), Edward Bird (1772-1819), Edward Villiers Rippingille (1789-1859), Samuel Colman (1780-1845) and Rolinda Sharples (1793-1838). The gallery includes interactive touchscreen PCs where you can find out more about the Bristol School and view a film about their favourite haunt, Leigh Woods.

Sculpture

Our sculpture collection includes work by Michael Rysbrack (1694-1770), Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915) and contemporary pieces including Delabole Slate Circle by Bristol-born Richard Long (b. 1945).

Art in the historic houses

Paintings from the Fine Art collection are also displayed at The Red Lodge, The Georgian House, and pictures by William James Muller (1812-1845) and other Victorian artists can be seen in the Picture Room at Blaise Castle House Museum.

Saint Nicholas' Church is also home to The Hogarth Triptych which people can visit for free. In 1756 William Hogarth completed a great triptych depicting the Sealing of the Tomb, an altarpiece commissioned for St Mary Redcliffe Church. The altarpiece was purchased by Bristol Museums and Galleries with the help of the National Arts Collections Fund and is now housed In Saint Nicholas' Church.

The church on St Nicholas Street, Bristol, is accessible to visitors from Monday to Friday, during office hours. If you would like to arrange to see the altarpiece please contact staff on site. Telephone: 0117 903 9010.

What is in store?

Altogether there are around 1,200 paintings, 200 sculptures, and over 20,000 drawings, watercolours and prints in the Fine Art collection. These cannot all be on display all the time so much of the collection is in store. All artworks are sensitive to the environment and works on paper in particular are very vulnerable to light and can only be displayed for short periods at a time.

We are also able to provide access to works kept in store, visitors just need to make an appointment with the Fine Art Collection Officer.

Why collect?

The Fine Art collection has always been about preserving art by local, national and international artists for Bristol. Our British and European art collections represent many key artists and art movements, from the Renaissance to Land Art. We are also very fortunate in holding the Braikenridge collection of drawings of the city commissioned during the early nineteenth century, making Bristol the best-recorded city before the age of photography outside London.

How can I access the store or services?

If you have an art enquiry, or would like to view a work in store at the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, please contact:

Julia Carver
Fine Art Collections Officer
Tel: 0117 922 3581
Email: julia.carver@bristol.gov.uk

What's new

As well as curating the permanent displays in the galleries the Fine Art department organises exhibitions and events, from our annual exhibition in the Watercolour gallery, to full-scale shows in the Exhibition gallery, to talks in the galleries. We also continue to develop the Fine Art collection with newly-acquired works of art. The following sections give more detail about our new acquisitions.

We have made some exciting new acquisitions. Coronation Time, the Floodlit Tower of Bristol University Wills Building, 1953, is a dramatic painting by Clifford Hanney of the city when the country was celebrating the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in the otherwise austere post war years of rationing. In Bristol there were civic processions, sports events, pageants on the river and the Downs, window displays in shops and homes, street parties, fireworks and illuminations. The streets in the city centre were decorated and major buildings were flood-lit. With the support of the Friends of Bristol Art Gallery we acquired two Social Realist paintings by Bristol artist Gerald Cains, Broken Roundabout and Terrace House Demoliton: Barton Hill which shows the slum clearance before the tower blocks were erected on this Bristol estate.

Through the Government’s Acceptance in Lieu scheme administered by the MLA we acquired the important Dutch seascape Shipping on the Schelde off Antwerp by Bonaventura Peeters.The painting shows the celebrations in Antwerp at the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648, with the Archduke Leopold Wilhem, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands and Spanish diplomat Don Gaspar de Bracamonte y Guzmán aboard the State Yacht. Cannons are being fired from land and sea, crowds are on the shore, and a flotilla of ships brimming with passengers sails towards the city.

We have also acquired a group of Urban Art pieces. Bristol-based street artist Ziml whose work can be seen around the city created Concrete Form II a canvas piece especially for the Museum while we acquired the lightbox piece What’s the point of robbery when nothing is worth taking? from Motorboy, once more with the generous support of the Friends. The Museum is also working with Acer One and Andy Council on new pieces that will be unveiled at M Shed when it opens later this year.

Covering similar terrain but from the USA the Museum purchased Ray Caesar’s hyper real gothic print Love Letters, Chris Anthony’s vintage-style photograph SKAM and Happy Pink Explosion an acrylic work on canvas by Buff Monster as a legacy from the Art from the New World show of summer 2010.

Art fund international

We have now acquired some important new work for Reflections and Interactions through our £1 million award from the Art Fund under Art Fund International. Sleepers number 2, 3 and 4 are from a series of large-scale black and white photographs by Yto Barrada. These arresting images show reposing figures with their heads covered, in a public park in the artist’s home town of Tangiers. They are awaiting their illegal and perilous passage across the Strait of Gibraltar to Europe, where the hope is that they will find work and a better quality of life. The title alludes to the sense that the sleepers are giving up their identity, ‘sleepwalking’ into a new anonymity on mainland Europe.

Holiday for Tomorrow is an installation by Korean artist Haegue Yang that uses traditional Korean wooden screens and customised Venetian blinds in different colours (a recurrent motif in Yang’s work) to create an evocative space that exists somewhere between the public and private realm.We have also jointly acquired a major body of work by Walid Raad with Gallery of Modern Art Glasgow. The Atlas Group is an archive that includes photography, video and documents from or about the Lebanese Civil Wars of 1975-1990. Underpinning the archive are the lectures by artist Walid Raad, during which it is always pointed out but often overlooked that the archive is a fiction. Bristol and Glasgow have together acquired three large-scale digitally manipulated prints and a miniature exhibition of the whole archive in model form, comprising prints, sculpture and video, Scratching on things I could disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World, Part I, Chapter 1, Section 139: The Atlas Group, 2008.