Nottingham Castle, Museum & Art Gallery

Nottingham Castle, Museum & Art Gallery

Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery is the base for the City’s important collections of Fine and Decorative Arts. Permanent exhibitions include themed displays of costume and textiles, silverware, glass and jewellery, as well as contemporary craft, a ceramics study gallery and the Ballentyne collection of 20th-century studio ceramics. The first floor gallery spaces host temporary exhibitions of regional, national and international artists.

The majority of the Nottingham City Museums and Galleries’ collection of paintings is housed at the Castle, both on display and in store. In general, between 130 and 200 works are on public display in the architectural splendour of the ‘Long Gallery’. The current ‘Salon-style’ hang is inspired by an image of the Long Gallery in 1878, when the Museum first opened to the public. The collection was founded in the same year and now numbers some 800 oil paintings, over 4,000 watercolours, drawings and prints and a small collection of sculpture, including mediaeval ‘Nottingham’ alabasters. Contemporary art has also been collected from the founding of the museum, across all art forms.

England Culture & Tourism Route © Monika Simon Newbound 2020