The Royal Manchester Institution, c. 1836 (now Manchester Art Gallery), by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd. Watercolour on paper. H 14 x W 21.6 cm. Collection: Manchester Art Gallery. Accession number: 1920.140. Acquisition method: purchased, 1920. Kindly made available via Art UK on the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence (CC BY-NC). Text and formatting by Jacqueline Banerjee. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Charles Barry's neo-classical building of 1824-35 would only recently have been completed when Shepherd painted it. It was donated to the city in 1881, and opened as its art gallery in the following year (see Hartwell 26). Happily, it looks very much the same today as it did when Shepherd painted it.
Related Material
Bibliography
Hartwell, Clare. Manchester. Pevsner Architectural Guides. Corrected ed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002.
Created 20 November 2020