Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum

Established	1901
Location	Argyle Street, Glasgow G3 8AG, Scotland
Visitors	1,832,097 (2019)[1]
Website	www.glasgowlife.org.uk

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum is a museum and art gallery in

The original Kelvingrove Museum opened in 1870 as the City Industrial Museum, Glasgow's first municipal museum.^[4] It was housed in Kelvingrove House, a mansion which was built in 1783 and was originally the home of Lord Provost Patrick Colquhoun.^[5][6] Kelvingrove House stood to the east^[7] of the present art gallery museum, on the site now occupied by Kelvingrove Park's skatepark.^[8] The Kelvingrove Museum's growing collection led to a new wing being added to the house between 1874 and 1876. The original Kelvingrove House was demolished in 1899, with the museum wing being demolished in 1911.^[9]

Creation (1888–1901)

The construction of Kelvingrove was partly financed by the proceeds of the

The centrepiece of the Centre Hall is a concert pipe organ constructed and installed by Lewis & Co. The organ was originally commissioned as part of the Glasgow International Exhibition, held in Kelvingrove Park in 1901. The organ was installed in the concert hall of the exhibition, which was capable of seating 3,000 people. The Centre Hall of the then newly completed Art Gallery and Museum was intended from the beginning to be a space in which to hold concerts. When the 1901 exhibition ended, a Councillor urged the Glasgow Corporation (now Glasgow Council) to purchase the organ, stating that without it, "the art gallery would be a body without a soul". Purchase price and installation costs were met from the surplus exhibition proceeds, and the organ was installed in the Centre Hall by Lewis and Co. The present case front in walnut with non-functional display pipes was commissioned at this time from John W. Simpson. Simpson was the senior partner of Simpson & Milner Allen, architects of the gallery building.^[13]

There is an

Kelvingrove was reopened by Queen

Immediately after its 2003–2006 refurbishment, the museum was the most popular free-to-enter visitor attraction in Scotland, recording 2.23 million visitors in 2007.[19]^[20] These numbers made it the most visited museum in the United Kingdom outside London that year.^[21] From 2006 to 2009 the museum had 5 million visitors.^[22]

Collections

The museum's collections came mainly from the original Kelvingrove Museum and the

The museum houses Christ of Saint John of the Cross by Salvador Dalí. The copyright of this painting was bought by the curator at the time after a meeting with Dalí. Between 1993 and 2006, the painting was moved to the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art.^[23]

The museum also contains a large gift of the decorative arts from Anne Hull Grundy, an art collector and philanthropist, covering the history of European jewellery in the 18th and 19th centuries.^[24]

Gallery

• 
  Sarcophagus of Pabasa.
• 
  Pipe organ built by Lewis & Co, 1901.
• 
  Head and upper body of the goddess Sekhmet, Egypt, 18th dynasty, reign of Amenhotep III, 1390-1352 BCE.
• 
  The Floating Heads by Sophie Cave, 2006, in the East Court.

• 
  Spitfire F.21 LA198 of 602 (City of Glasgow) Squadron, in the West Court.
• 
  Portrait of the Art Dealer Alexander Reid by Vincent van Gogh, 1887.
• 
  A Man in Armour by Rembrandt, 1655 (?)
• 
  Mary Pownall - The Harpy Celaeno, 1902.
• 
  Paul Gauguin, Østre Anlæg Park, Copenhagen, 1885.

• 
  Return to Sender by Sean Reed, 1996.
• 
  The Avant Armour, c.1440-1445.
• 
  A Lady in Black by Francis Cadell, c.1926.
• 
  The Tuileries Gardens, Paris by Camille Pissarro, 1900.

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.

• Museum website