The Guildhall Art Gallery is the museum that houses the collection of the City of London.
Located in the Moorgate area, it looks like a semi-gothic style building, inspired by the homonymous building of the Guildhall, today the town hall.
The project for the construction of the gallery was completed, for the first time, in 1885 but the original building was destroyed in 1914 together with more than one center of works present inside, drawings, prints and about twenty sculptures. It was only in 1985 that the city of London decided to rebuild a new gallery and the project was entrusted to the English architect Richard Gilbert Scott who adopted a post-modern style for the new building.
The works ended in 1999. The new gallery was designed to include more than four thousand pieces. The Guildhall Gallery has several Victorian-era masterpieces, displayed in the original spaces dating back to the nineteenth century. The permanent collection therefore starts from the Victorian era and then passes through the Pre Raphaelites, Oriental art, and Classicism.
From a strictly artistic point of view, the Guildhall Gallery crosses the so-called "long nineteenth century", characterized by a change of style in art where even the pictorial subjects change and modern life becomes the protagonist, that of every day that is new source of inspiration together with social classes or the new vision of romance, beauty. Masterpiece of the Guildhall Gallery is certainly the great painting by John Singleton Copley, entitled "The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar". Temporary exhibitions are also set up in the museum.
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