Wolverhampton Art Gallery - The Collection

The Collection

The most outstanding artwork of international importance in the collection is the large-scale painting Peace and Plenty Binding the Arrows of War(1614) by the Flemish Baroque painter Abraham Janssens van Nuyssen (ca. 1567/1576 - 1632). Commissioned and paid for by the Antwerp Guild of Old Crossbowmen, it was a pendant to the Rubens’s Crowning of the Victor. In the 1800s, the city’s guilds were broken up and their treasures dispersed. Janssen’s picture eventually found its way to a Mrs Thornley of Birmingham. In 1885, she sold it to Wolverhampton Art Gallery. This is the only painting by Janssens in British public collections and a splendid example of Flemish Baroque Art.

Apart from the Janssens' painting, the collection of Old Masters is relatively small. It includes a version of "A Spinner's Grace" by Gerard Dou, "Bouquet of Flowers" by Jan van Huysum. There is a collection of Old Masters' drawings and an etching by Wenceslas Hollar.

A significant part of the Gallery collection was formed from bequests and gifts given by local benefactors and patrons of art Sidney Cartwright (1802–1883), Philip Horsman and Paul Lutz (1832–1899). They mainly collected contemporary and early 19th-century British art and today the holdings of the Gallery are still particularly strong in artworks from the Victorian period.

In the 1920s-1950s, a large number of artworks by Frank Brangwyn (1867–1956) were given to the gallery by the artist himself, and by his friend and member of Wolverhampton Art Committee Matthew Biggar Walker.

In 1924, a significant collection of Eastern weapons was secured. During the first decades of the 20th century many specimens of Eastern Applied art and British and Eastern ceramics and glass were given to the Gallery by the members of the prominent local Bantock family and several other collectors.

The Gallery has substantial collection of japanned ware and Bilston enamels. These collections represent trades and manufactures for which Wolverhampton was famous in the 18th and 19th centuries. The purposeful collecting policy of the 1970s brought to the Gallery a number of high quality artworks by leading British artists of the 18th-century Georgian period.

The gallery has strong holdings of artworks by local artists, such as John Fullwood (1854–1931), Joseph Vickers de Ville (1856–1925), George Phoenix (1863–1935), Alfred Egerton Cooper (1883–1974). In 1990s, following the re-structure of museum services across the area, the art and local history collections of the Bilston Museum and Art Gallery (now Bilston Craft Gallery) were transferred to Wolverhampton. They brought to the Gallery artworks by Edwin Butler Bayliss (1874–1950), another local painter of the industrial landscape of the Black Country.

Since the late 1960s, Wolverhampton Art Gallery has been collecting Pop Art, and holds a substantial permanent Pop Art collection.

A special feature of the Gallery is the collection of artworks which document and analyse the time of Troubles in Northern Ireland.

At present, the Wolverhampton Art Gallery collection consists of about 12,000 artefacts: oil paintings and works on paper from 17th-20th centuries; collection of Eastern objects of Applied Art; japanned ware; enamels; ceramics and glass; dolls and toys; local history. Dr John Fraser's collection of geological specimens has also been preserved at the gallery.