Manchester Art Gallery

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The side of the Manchester Art Gallery facing onto Princess Street

Manchester Art Gallery is a free-to-view municipally-owned public art gallery in Manchester City Centre in the North West of England.

Wynford Dewhurst - The Picnic (1908)

The Gallery was extended by Hopkins Architects in May 2002 to take in the old Atheneaum building next door, and now occupies three buildings. One building is the Grade I listed building^[1] that was originally the Royal Manchester Institution designed by Sir Charles Barry in 1824.

The gallery houses the civic art collection of Manchester. As well as art of international significance, there are many works specifically related to Manchester (especially in the CIS-sponsored Manchester Room).

One very significant collection in the gallery is of works by Pierre Adolphe Valette. Valette was a French impressionist who painted and taught in Manchester in the early years of the C20th. Valette's reputation is growing, and in the Manchester Art Gallery it is not difficult to see the immediate appeal of the impressionist scenes of foggy Manchester streets and canals. A Cézanne hangs in the same room, and it is quite a shock to see the similarity in treatment and subject between Cézanne's misty French river bridge and a particular river bridge in the pre-Clean Air Act Mancunian fog. One very important fact about Valette is that Lowry was one of his pupils: the influence on Lowry of impressionism, via Valette, is immediately obvious here, where pictures by the two artists hang together.

The museum also houses The Picnic (1908), an important work by the British Impressionist painter Wynford Dewhurst, who was born in Manchester.