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.
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Famous quotes containing the words speech, room, gallery and/or museum:
“We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear those words I say to myself, “That man is a Red, that man is a Communist.” You never heard a real American talk in that manner.”
—Frank Hague (1876–1956)
“I am trembling:
I am suddenly charged with their language, these six strings,
Suddenly made to see they can declare
Nothing but harmony, and may not move
Without a happy stirring of the air
That builds within this room a second room....”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“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)
“[A] Dada exhibition. Another one! What’s the matter with everyone wanting to make a museum piece out of Dada? Dada was a bomb ... can you imagine anyone, around half a century after a bomb explodes, wanting to collect the pieces, sticking it together and displaying it?”
—Max Ernst (1891–1976)