One of the great Pre-Raphaelite collections, free, and the site of the strangest art row of the last decade.
Manchester’s civic art collection was assembled largely by nineteenth-century manufacturers buying contemporary British painting, which is why it is unusually strong in exactly one thing: the Pre-Raphaelites.
The core building is Charles Barry’s 1835 Royal Manchester Institution, joined in 2002 to a modern wing. Entry is free.
The Pre-Raphaelites
Ford Madox Brown’s Work (1852–65) is the centrepiece and the most Manchester painting in Britain — a Hampstead street dug up by navvies, with Thomas Carlyle and F. D. Maurice standing to one side watching other people labour. Brown wrote a pamphlet explaining every figure. It is a Victorian argument about the dignity of work, painted over thirteen years, and it rewards standing in front of for a while.
Also: Holman Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd, Millais, Rossetti’s Astarte Syriaca, Burne-Jones, and Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs.
The Hylas row
In January 2018 the gallery took Hylas and the Nymphs off the wall and replaced it with a blank space and a set of Post-it notes, as part of a piece by the artist Sonia Boyce prompting visitors to comment on how Victorian painting represents women.
It was intended as a week-long provocation and it was reported worldwide as a censorship story within about a day. The painting went back up after a week. The gallery got a great deal of attention and a fair amount of criticism, including from people who thought a public collection should not remove a work in order to start a conversation about it.
The picture is back in its place. Nobody in Manchester has entirely stopped arguing about it.
Elsewhere in the building
Turner watercolours, a Gallery of Craft and Design with an excellent ceramics and silver holding, and a costume collection.
The contemporary programme is more variable — sometimes very good, sometimes a room of wall text — and it is free, so the cost of a miss is nothing.
There is a decent café on the ground floor and a shop worth a look.
Ninety minutes is enough. It is five minutes from the Town Hall and about the same from the Northern Quarter.
More Museums
Science and Industry Museum
Built on the oldest surviving passenger railway station in the world, and free.
Manchester Museum
Reopened in 2023 with a new South Asia gallery, a rebuilt Egypt display and 174 objects sent home.
The Whitworth
A gallery that opens into a park, with the best textile collection outside London and Turner's watercolours.