New Gallery (London)

Central Hall of the New Gallery, from the catalogue New Gallery Notes, Summer 1888.

The New Gallery was an art gallery founded at 121 Regent Street W., London, 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

The New Gallery was designed by Edward Robert Robson, F.S.A., and constructed in little more than three months to ensure that it could open in the summer of 1888.

The gallery was built on the site of an old fruit market. 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. 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.

Artists and exhibitions

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, and George Frederic Watts and Lord Leighton transferred their loyalty to the New Gallery.

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. The private view was a great social success, with former Prime Minister William Gladstone among the early arrivals.

In 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. 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.

The New Gallery was the setting for a major Burne-Jones retrospective in 1892-93 and a memorial exhibition of his works in 1898.

Carr continued as co-director until 1908. The Arts and Crafts Exhibition of 1910 was the last to be held at the New Gallery, which briefly became the New Gallery Restaurant in 1910, and was remodelled again and opened as a cinema in January 1913.

References

• Blackburn, Henry (May 1888). "New Gallery Notes No. 1". Chatto and Windus. Retrieved 2008-12-07.
• Crane, Walter (1905). ""Of the Arts and Crafts Movement"". Ideals In Art: Papers Theoretical Practical Critical. George Bell & Sons. Retrieved 2008-12-09.
• Parry, Linda: Textiles of the Arts & Crafts Movement, Thames and Hudson, revised edition 2005, ISBN 0-500-28536-5
• Parry, Linda, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement: A Sourcebook, New York, Portland House, 1989 ISBN 0-517-69260-0
• Wildman, Stephen: Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998, ISBN 0870998595