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:
“You should go to picture-galleries and museums of sculpture to be acted upon, and not to express or try to form your own perfectly futile opinion. It makes no difference to you or the world what you may think of any work of art. That is not the question; the point is how it affects you. The picture is the judge of your capacity, not you of its excellence; the world has long ago passed its judgment upon it, and now it is for the work to estimate you.”
—Anna C. Brackett (1836–1911)
“It doesn’t matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serves a great cause: accretion of the national wealth.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)