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:
“The difference between human vision and the image perceived by the faceted eye of an insect may be compared with the difference between a half-tone block made with the very finest screen and the corresponding picture as represented by the very coarse screening used in common newspaper pictorial reproduction. The same comparison holds good between the way Gogol saw things and the way average readers and average writers see things.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“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)