Dulwich Picture Gallery is an art gallery in Dulwich, South London. The Gallery in its current iteration was designed by Regency architect Sir John Soane using an innovative and influential method of illumination, and was opened to the public in 1817. The building is the oldest public art gallery in England but the Gallery only recently became an independent charitable trust, established as such in 1994, Until this time the Gallery was part of Alleyn's College of God's Gift, a charitable foundation established by the actor, entrepreneur and philathropist Edward Alleyn in the early seventeenth century. Due to the aquisition of artworks by its founders and bequests of varying sizes from its many patrons, Dulwich Picture Gallery houses one of the country’s finest collections of Old Masters, especially rich in French, Italian and Spanish Baroque paintings and in British portraits from Tudor times to the 19th century.
Read more about Dulwich Picture Gallery: Gallery Design, Collection, The Education Programme, Gallery, Directors
Famous quotes containing the words picture and/or gallery:
“We live in an age of reproduction. Most of what makes up our personal picture of the world we have never seen with our own eyes—or rather we have seen it with our own eyes, but not on the spot: our knowledge comes to us from a distance, we are tele- viewers, tele-hearers, tele-knowers.”
—Max Frisch (1911–1991)
“I should like to have seen a gallery of coronation beauties, at Westminster Abbey, confronted for a moment by this band of Island girls; their stiffness, formality, and affectation contrasted with the artless vivacity and unconcealed natural graces of these savage maidens. It would be the Venus de’ Medici placed beside a milliner’s doll.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)