The New Gallery is a Crown Estate-owned Grade II Listed building [1] at 121 Regent Street, London, which originally was an art gallery from 1888 to 1910, The New Gallery Restaurant from 1910 to 1913, The New Gallery Cinema from 1913 to 1953, [2] and a Seventh-day Adventist Church from 1953 to 1992. [3] After having been empty for more than ten years, the building was a Habitat furniture store from 2006 to 2011, and since September 2012 it is a flagship store for Burberry. [2]
The New Gallery was founded in 1888 by J. Comyns Carr and Charles Edward Hallé. Carr and Hallé had been co-directors of Sir Coutts Lindsay's Grosvenor Gallery, but resigned from that troubled gallery in 1887. The building was designed by Edward Robert Robson FSA, and constructed in little more than three months to ensure that it could open in the summer of 1888. [4] [5]
The gallery was built on the site of an old fruit market. [5] Existing cast-iron columns supporting the roof were encased with marble to give the impression of "massive marble shafts" topped with gilded Greek capitals. The architrave, frieze, and cornices above the columns were covered with platinum leaf. [4] At the opening, the West and North Galleries on the ground floor were devoted to oil paintings, and the first floor balcony around the Central Hall displayed smaller works in oils, watercolours, etchings and drawings. Sculpture was displayed in the Central Hall itself. [4]
The New Gallery continued the ideals of the Grosvenor, and was an important venue for Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movement artists. Edward Burne-Jones, then at the height of his popularity, supported the new venture, serving on its Consulting Committee and lending three large oils for the opening, thus ensuring its financial success. Lawrence Alma-Tadema and William Holman Hunt also joined the Consulting Committee, [5] and George Frederic Watts and Lord Leighton transferred their loyalty to the New Gallery. [5]
The private view of the first exhibition was held on Tuesday, 8 May 1888, and the exhibition opened to the public on Wednesday, 9 May, for three months. [4] The private view was a great social success, with former Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone among the early arrivals. [5]
In October and November 1888, the New Gallery hosted the first showcase of industrial and applied arts by the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society under the direction of its founding president, illustrator and designer Walter Crane. [6] No attempt had been made to show contemporary decorative arts in London since the Grosvenor Gallery's Winter Exhibition of 1881, which included cartoons for mosaic, tapestry, and glass, and the Society's annual (later triennial) exhibitions at the New Gallery were important events in the Arts and Crafts Movement at the end of the 19th century. [7] [8]
In 1890, the New Gallery held an important exhibition of Tudor portraits and relics under the auspices of Queen Victoria. [9]
The New Gallery was the setting for a major Burne-Jones retrospective in 1892–93 and a memorial exhibition of his works in 1898. [5] In 1893 the New Gallery exposed for the first time four panels by Masaccio, later attributed to the Pisa Polyptych (now in Staatliche Museen, Berlin). [10]
Carr continued as co-director until 1908. The Arts and Crafts Exhibition of 1910 was the last to be held at the New Gallery. [8]
In 1910, the interior was converted into The New Gallery Restaurant, but it was converted again in January 1913, this time to a cinema. Enlargement and modifications were made to the cinema in 1925, including the installation of a Wurlitzer organ. [2] It was the location of the UK showing of the first full-length animated cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1938.
After World War II the cinema struggled, partly because it was slightly off-West End, and the then owners, Gaumont British Theatres. sold the lease to the Seventh-day Adventist Church and was used as a church from 1953 until the 1990s, although the cinema was occasionally used for religious films. It remained empty until 2006, when it became a Habitat furniture store. The Wurlitzer organ remained in place and was restored to its original condition. [3]
Habitat surrendered the lease in March 2011, and in September 2012 the site become a flagship store for Burberry. [2]
The New Gallery became a Grade II Listed building in 1992. [3]
The Arts and Crafts movement was an international trend in the decorative and fine arts that developed earliest and most fully in the British Isles and subsequently spread across the British Empire and to the rest of Europe and America.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner who formed a seven-member "Brotherhood" partly modelled on the Nazarene movement. The Brotherhood was only ever a loose association and their principles were shared by other artists of the time, including Ford Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes and Marie Spartali Stillman. Later followers of the principles of the Brotherhood included Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and John William Waterhouse.
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet, was an English painter and designer associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's style and subject matter.
The Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (RBSA) is an art society, based in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham, England, where it owns and operates an art gallery, the RBSA Gallery, on Brook Street, just off St Paul's Square. It is both a registered charity, and a registered company.
Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (1861–1875) was a furnishings and decorative arts manufacturer and retailer founded by the artist and designer William Morris with friends from the Pre-Raphaelites. With its successor Morris & Co. (1875–1940) the firm's medieval-inspired aesthetic and respect for hand-craftsmanship and traditional textile arts had a profound influence on the decoration of churches and houses into the early 20th century.
The Grosvenor Gallery was an art gallery in London founded in 1877 by Sir Coutts Lindsay and his wife Blanche. Its first directors were J. Comyns Carr and Charles Hallé. The gallery proved crucial to the Aesthetic Movement because it provided a home for those artists whose approaches the more classical and conservative Royal Academy did not welcome, such as Edward Burne-Jones and Walter Crane.
Joseph Edward Southall RWS NEAC RBSA was an English painter associated with the Arts and Crafts movement.
Nelson Ethelred Dawson was an English artist and member of the Arts and Crafts movement.
John Roddam Spencer Stanhope was an English artist associated with Edward Burne-Jones and George Frederic Watts and often regarded as a second-wave pre-Raphaelite. His work is also studied within the context of Aestheticism and British Symbolism. As a painter, Stanhope worked in oil, watercolor, fresco, tempera, and mixed media. His subject matter was mythological, allegorical, biblical, and contemporary. Stanhope was born in Cawthorne, near Barnsley, Yorkshire, England, and died in Florence, Italy. He was the uncle and teacher of the painter Evelyn De Morgan and encouraged then unknown local artist Abel Hold to exhibit at the Royal Academy, which he did 16 times.
Charles Edward Hallé (1846–1914), sometimes given as Edward Charles Hallé, was an English Victorian painter and gallery manager. He was a painter of history scenes, genre scenes, and portraits.
John Henry Dearle was a British textile and stained-glass designer trained by the artist and craftsman William Morris who was much influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Dearle designed many of the later wallpapers and textiles released by Morris & Co., and contributed background and foliage patterns to tapestry designs featuring figures by Edward Burne-Jones and others. Beginning in his teens as a shop assistant and then design apprentice, Dearle rose to become Morris & Co.'s chief designer by 1890, creating designs for tapestries, embroidery, wallpapers, woven and printed textiles, stained glass, and carpets. Following Morris's death in 1896, Dearle was appointed Art Director of the firm, and became its principal stained glass designer on the death of Burne-Jones in 1898.
Joseph William Comyns Carr, often referred to as J. Comyns Carr, was an English drama and art critic, gallery director, author, poet, playwright and theatre manager.
The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society was formed in London in 1887 to promote the exhibition of decorative arts alongside fine arts. The Society's exhibitions were held annually at the New Gallery from 1888 to 1890, and roughly every three years thereafter, were important in the flowering of the British Arts and Crafts Movement in the decades prior to World War I.
A number of Wurlitzer theatre organs were imported and installed in the United Kingdom in the period from 1925 to just before the Second World War (1939–45).
Pygmalion and the Image is the second series of four oil paintings in the Pygmalion and Galatea series by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones which was completed between 1875 and 1878. The two collections may be seen below, in the Gallery, the first being now owned by Lord Lloyd Webber, and the second housed at the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. This article deals with an appraisal of the second series.
The Golden Stairs is one of the best-known paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. It began in 1876 and was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1880.
The Mill is an Aesthetic Movement, Renaissance-inspired oil on canvas painting completed by Edward Burne-Jones in 1882. The painting's main feature is three women dancing in front of a mill pond on a summer evening, with a vague wooded landscape spanning the background. The Mill is an oil on canvas painting. It is 91 centimetres (36 in) in height, and 197 centimetres (78 in) in width.
Love Among the Ruins is a painting by English artist Edward Burne-Jones which exists in two versions, a watercolour completed in 1873 and an oil painting completed in 1894. It depicts a man and a woman amid ruined architecture. The work is a synthesis of influences from the Pre-Raphaelite, Symbolist and Aesthetic art movements. The ambiguous scene without a clear narrative is considered one of Burne-Jones' best works.
The Wheel of Fortune is an oil painting on canvas by the British Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, made from 1875 to 1883. The painting combines classical and medieval themes to present an allegory of the vagaries of life, a vanitas, with individual lives elevated or cast down as the wheel of fortune turns. Burne-Jones commented: "My wheel of Fortune is a true-to-life image; it comes to fetch each of us in turn, then it crushes us." The prime version has been in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris since 1980.
Edward Stott was an English painter of the late Victorian to early twentieth century period. He trained in Paris under Carolus Duran and was strongly influenced by the Rustic Naturalism of Bastien-Lepage and the work of the Impressionists, which he married with the English landscape tradition of John Linnell and Samuel Palmer. In the mid-1880s he settled in rural Sussex where he was the central figure in an artistic colony. His forté was painting scenes of domestic and working rural life and the surrounding landscapes often depicted in fading light. Stott's work achieved critical and commercial success at home and in Europe in his lifetime but his style of painting became unfashionable in the aftermath of the Great War and much of his work is now neglected and unconsidered.