Guildhall Art Gallery

The Guildhall Art Gallery houses the art collection of the City of London, England. It occupies a building that was completed in 1999 to replace an earlier building destroyed in The Blitz in 1941. It is a stone building in a semi-gothic style intended to be sympathetic to the historic Guidhall, which is adjacent and to which it is connected internally.

The gallery was originally built in 1885 to house art collections from the City of London Corporation but the collections were destroyed during World War II.

The collection consists of about 4,000 works, of which around 250 are on display at any one time. Many of the paintings are of London themes. There is also a significant collection of Victorian era art, including Pre-Raphaelites, which features paintings by artists such as John Everett Millais and Edwin Landseer, and a view of Salisbury Cathedral by John Constable. The centrepiece of the largest gallery is John Singleton Copley's huge painting "The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar".

The Guildhall complex was built on the site of London's Roman amphitheatre, and some of the remains of this are displayed "in situ" in a room in the basement of the art gallery.

External links

* [http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Corporation/leisure_heritage/libraries_archives_museums_galleries/guildhall_art_gallery/ Official website of the Guildhall Art Gallery]