Museum of Gloucester


The Museum of Gloucester in Brunswick Road is the main museum in the City of Gloucester. It has recently been extensively renovated following a large National Heritage Lottery Fund grant and it reopened on Gloucester Day, 3 September 2011.
In March 2016, The Museum rebranded itself and used to be called Gloucester City Museum & Art Gallery.
The Gloucester Life is a smaller museum in Westgate Street, dealing with the social history of Gloucestershire.

Origins

The museum opened on 12 March 1860 as a private venture in three rooms at The Black Swan, provided rent-free by the poet Sydney Dobell. In 1896 the Corporation of the City of Gloucester took over the venture.

The building

The Victorian building, in the early Renaissance style, inspired by the work of T.G. Jackson, is Grade II listed by English Heritage. It was originally the Price Memorial Hall of the Gloucester Science and Art Society, built for Margaret Price as a memorial to her husband William Edwin Price in 1893, and designed by F.S. Waller. The Corporation of the City of Gloucester took over the building as the City Museum & Art Gallery in 1902.
Originally only on the ground floor, a first floor was added in 1958 which was opened by the archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler.

Collections

Objects in the museum include:
The art collection includes about 300 paintings including works by J. M. W. Turner and Thomas Gainsborough as well as a painting of Oliver Cromwell without his famous warts.
In 1977, the collection acquired a landscape of Newnham-on-Severn from Dean Hill by William Turner of Oxford with help from The Art Fund.

Activities

In 1976, excavations by the Museum's Excavation Unit at St. Oswald's Priory yielded important new finds relating to the Saxon minster founded by Æthelred, Ealdorman of Mercia and his wife Æthelflæd in the 890s.

Selected publications