The Lady Lever Art Gallery is part of National Museums Liverpool and contains the best of William Hesketh Lever’s personal art collection. Lever started collecting art to promote Sunlight Soap. The Gallery is famous for its Pre-Raphaelite paintings by Millais, Rossetti and Burne-Jones and holds works by Leighton, Turner, Constable, Gainsborough and Reynolds. Its outstanding collections of British sculpture, Wedgwood, Chinese porcelain and eighteenth-century furniture are among the best in the country.
Lever bought pictures which would appeal to the housewives who were his customers. At first he collected art for business but as he grew richer and more confident he developed a taste for collecting. He mostly collected British art but he was also fascinated by Chinese porcelain, Roman sculpture and Greek vases which he collected to show the styles that had influenced British artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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