Biography
Bolton Art Gallery is managed by Bolton Library & Museum Services, Bolton Council. Its art collection totals over 3,500 items. Nearly all of these are works by British artists dating from the 18th century to the present day. The collection's strength is its 20th-century oils, watercolours, prints and sculptures. Also in the collection are examples of decorative art including ceramics, glass and netsuke, as well as art and photography from the Mass-Observation project. Highlights include a significant collection of works by Bolton-born artist Thomas Moran and his wife Mary Nimmo Moran (who painted in watercolour). There are also works by Thomas Rowlandson, William Blake and J. M. W. Turner (whose works here are in watercolour), as well as a small selection of old master paintings by Luca Giordano, Adam Colonia and Gaspard Dughet. Supporting the painting collection are over 1,000 prints, the majority of which are by twentieth-century British artists.
Of particular importance is the Sycamore Collection which is broadly representative of British printmaking from 1900 to 1960 and provides an excellent resource for both reference and display. The sculpture collection consists of around 50 works, the majority of which are bronzes by mid-twentieth-century British artists. Several internationally celebrated artists such as Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Jacob Epstein (who had particular connections to Bolton) and Bolton-born Paul Mason are represented.
This small but outstanding collection provides an extraordinary resource, allowing people from the local area to see and study sculpture by world renowned artists without having to travel to a national museum or gallery. The majority of the 455 oil paintings in the collection are British. Most date from the 19th and 20th centuries. These include works by Ben Nicholson, Laura Knight, Thomas Moran and Roland Penrose to name a few. A small but significant group of paintings date from the seventeenth century, with good examples by Italian, French and Dutch artists.
In 1946, Bolton Art Gallery opened to the public as one of the first new postwar purpose-built art galleries; work had begun on the Gallery's construction in 1939. Its original floor-plan consisted of specifically designated spaces which were two large exhibition rooms for oil paintings, a sculpture gallery and four gallery rooms for the display of watercolours.
Until 1960, Bolton Art Gallery had few examples of 20th-century British Art, and works that it did possess had come mainly from the Frank Hindley Smith Bequest (1940). Hindley Smith was a wealthy Bolton industrialist, art collector, and a member of the CAS. He was influenced by Roger Fry's ideas, who as a friend had designed a decorative scheme for Hindley Smith's house, 'Chyngton Way', at Seaford in Sussex. Hindley Smith developed a private art collection of mainly 19th and 20th-century French Art and 20th-century British Art which was inspired by Fry's artistic interests and theories. Hindley Smith's collection, therefore, contained examples of works by Walter Sickert and Philip Wilson Steer, as well as by Roger Fry and other Bloomsbury-associated artists. On his death, Hindley Smith stipulated that his collection of modem art and oriental ceramics should not be sold, but careful1y distributed by his executor, Percy Moore Turner, a London art dealer, to public art galleries in Great Britain and Ireland, either to form a nucleus from which a future collection could be formed, or to fill gaps in collections. Hindley Smith, it should be noted, was keenly interested in the educational role of public art collections and had been an individual member of the Museums Association since 1930. Under the Frank Hindley Smith Bequest of 1940, several institutions not then actively acquiring modem British art received gifts: these were Bolton Museum and Art Gallery, Castle Museum, in Norwich, Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Peterborough Art Gallery. Britain's then leading local authority collection of 20th-century British Art, Manchester City Art Gallery, also received a selection of works, as did two university institutions, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Ashmolean Museum, and two national art galleries, the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery. (Summerfield, 2007)
It became a member of the Contemporary Art Society in 1963 and Figure 1957 by Robert Clatworthy was the first CAS gift in 1964 followed by works by Sandra Blow, Elizabeth Blackadder, Terry Frost and more recently, Michael Landy.
