The University Art Collection
The University of Leeds Art Collection is recognised nationally as an important research resource and source of reference across a wide range of significant artists.
The Collection consists mainly of European, principally British paintings, drawings and prints, dating from the 16th century up to the present day, with small collections of sculpture and photographs. There is also a collection of Yorkshire Pottery, as well as a small group of Chinese and Japanese art works.
Since the late 19th century, a number of important gifts and bequests have provided the central core upon which the Art Collection has been built, contributing a variety of genre such as animal painting, seascape, rustic genre, landscape and portrait, including works by van Ruysdael, Morland, Corot and Sargent.
The largest and historically most important gift was presented by Sir Michael Sadler in 1923. Sadler was one of the earliest English enthusiasts for modernism in art, and his gift to the University included work by notable figures in the vanguard of early twentieth-century British art - Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Charles Ginner, Duncan Grant, Nina Hamnett, Augustus John and Edward Wadsworth.
The Sadler Gift proved to be the starting point for what has become the main strength of the University's Art Collection: its holdings of English modernism. Eric Gregory's Bequest in 1959 added work by David Jones, Ben Nicholson, Matthew Smith, Henry Moore, Ceri Richards and Victor Pasmore. This aspect of the Collection has been further augmented by gifts and bequests representing, inter alia, Reg Butler, Malcolm Drummond, Jacob Epstein, Terry Frost, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Harold Gilman, John Hoyland and Jacob Kramer.
During the 1960s, Quentin Bell (then Professor of Fine Art) acquired for the University a large group of drawings and watercolours by members of the Bloomsbury and Camden Town Groups, including Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Nina Hamnett, Harold Gilman, Malcolm Drummond, William Ratcliffe, Robert Bevan, Spencer Gore and Walter Sickert. At the same time, the University continued to collect works by its Gregory Fellows in Painting and Sculpture, as well purchasing many contemporary prints, including works by Alan Davie, David Hockney, Tess Jaray, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Bridget Riley.
These initiatives set the direction for subsequent acquisition policies, which have aimed where possible to further enhance the collections of twentieth-century British art, as well as develop the scope provided by existing holdings of late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century works with a regional interest. The development of the Art Collection depends largely upon private gifts and bequests, but it has also benefited from the generous support of the Contemporary Art Society, and both the National Art Collections Fund and the Resource/V&A Purchase Grant Fund, as well as the Friends of University Art and Music, have assisted with occasional purchases. The most recent acquisition is a fine collection of portraits and other miniatures by, or attributed to, Edward Westoby (1784-1873), generously gifted to the University by the brothers Richard, Stephen and Brian Harland, whose father started the collection in the early 1920s.
Selections from the University's Art Collection are exhibited in the Permanent Collection Room of the University Gallery.* These displays change periodically. (Study facilities for the reserve collection are available by appointment.) At the same time, a programme of temporary exhibitions is presented during each academic year, covering a wide range of historic and contemporary works, including painting, sculpture, graphics, photography and textiles.
* Until July 2004 there is not a separate Permanent Collection Room but the current centenary exhibition (23rd April-23rd July 2004) is of works from the Permanent Collection.
The Gallery has published a number of monographs on aspects of the Art Collection, and preparation of a complete catalogue of the oil paintings is in progress, and is due to be published in 2004.