The Old Speech Room Gallery & Museum is located in the Old Speech Room, which was built in 1819-1821 as a room to encourage public speaking. The gallery was opened in 1976 to house the School's collections, which include Egyptian and Greek antiquities, English watercolours, Modern British paintings, books and natural history artefacts. There is a set of gilt Easter eggs created by contemporary gold and silversmith Stuart Devlin, which have been designed in the tradition of Fabergé eggs and include surprise interiors. There are also some sculptures, including portrait busts of such Old Harrovians as Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Lord Byron.
The paintings include Sir Winston Churchill's A Distant View of Venice, 1929. Other artists include George Romney, David Jones, Victor Pasmore and Richard Shirley Smith.
The Museum hosts themed exhibits from its collections. Admission is free.
Read more about this topic: Harrow School
Famous quotes containing the words speech, room, gallery and/or museum:
“Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention. The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.”
—John Dos Passos (18961970)
“In some of those dense fir and spruce woods there is hardly room for the smoke to go up. The trees are a standing night, and every fir and spruce which you fell is a plume plucked from nights raven wing.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Each morning the manager of this gallery substituted some new picture, distinguished by more brilliant or harmonious coloring, for the old upon the walls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Flower picking.”
—Hawaiian saying no. 2710, lelo NoEau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)