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:
“When you’ve been blind as long as I have, you learn to see through your senses. I can’t explain it exactly, but you get a feeling about people when you meet them. You see a picture of them in your mind. Not just what they look like, but what they really are. You see them much more clearly than you do with your eyes. Maybe that’s why they say looks are deceptive.”
—George Bricker. Jean Yarbrough. Helen Page (Jane Adams)
“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)