The Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery is a large museum and art gallery in Bristol, England. It is run by the city council with no entrance fee. It holds designated museum status, granted by the national government to protect outstanding museums. It is situated in Clifton, about 0.5 miles (0.8 km) from the city centre.
The museum includes sections on natural history, local, national and international archaeology, and local industry. The art gallery contains works from all periods, including many by internationally famous artists, as well a collection of modern paintings of Bristol.
In the summer of 2009 the museum hosted an exhibition by Banksy, featuring more than 70 works of art, including animatronics and installations; it is his largest exhibition yet. It was developed in secrecy and with no advance publicity, but soon gained worldwide notoriety.
The building is of Edwardian Baroque architecture and has been designated by English Heritage as a grade II* listed building.
Read more about Bristol City Museum And Art Gallery: History, Collection, Friends of Bristol Art Gallery, Future Development, Other Museums
Famous quotes containing the words bristol, city, museum, art and/or gallery:
“Through the port comes the moon-shine astray!
It tips the guard’s cutlass and silvers this nook;
But ‘twill die in the dawning of Billy’s last day.
A jewel-block they’ll make of me to-morrow,
Pendant pearl from the yard-arm-end
Like the ear-drop I gave to Bristol Molly—
O, ‘tis me, not the sentence they’ll suspend.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“I dont think there is anything on earth more wonderful than those wistful incomplete friendships one makes now and then in an hour’s talk. You never see the people again, but the lingering sense of their presence in the world is like the glow of an unseen city at night—makes you feel the teemingness of it all.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“When I go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.”
—Willem De Kooning (b. 1904)
“To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall. Teach him something of natural history, and you place in his hands a catalogue of those which are worth turning round.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)