Bristol UK Postcards - Museum & Art Gallery

Bristol UK Postcards - Museum & Art Gallery

City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

This unposted postcard has the printed text...

44
The Wills Art Gallery, Bristol
Avonvale Series
J. B. & S. C.
Avonvale Series of Pictorial Post Cards
Printed in Belgium

The postcard has a hand-written date of April 7th, 1905. The postcad is addressed, but wasn't sent, to Miss Emily Ryall of Waukesha, Wisconsin. Emilly must have sent Alice B., the writer of this card, a postcard of the Exhibition Hall in Wisconsin as Alice writes...

What magnificent buildings the Exhibition Hall! I'm afraid, after all, our new Art Gallery is quite insignificant anyhow by comparison.

The building illustrated on the postcard is the one that was started in 1901 and opened in February 1905. Notice the absense of the University of Bristol's Wills Memorial Tower to the right of the museum. The tower was opened in 1925.

City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

This unused postcard has the printed text...

No. 233
E. S. London Copyright
Printed at works in Leipzig

Interior, City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

Interior, City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

This unused postcard has the printed text...

PS 106-15
Rapid Post Card
The Rapid Photo Printing Co. Ltd., London, E.C.
Printed in England

In 1823, the Bristol Institution for the Advancement of Science and Art was founded in a new building near the bottom of Park Street which they shared with the slightly older Bristol Literary and Philosophical Society. The neoclassical building was designed by Sir Charles Robert Cockerell (1788–1863), who was later to complete the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and build St. George’s Hall, Liverpool. The foundation stone of the building, which was, in 1871, to become the Freemason's Lodge, was laid on February 29th, 1920. The Annals of Philosophy describe the occasion...

On Feb. 29, the ceremony of laying the foundation stone of a new and magnificent building for literary anti philosophical purposes in Bristol was attended by the Mayor, W. Fripp, Jun. Esq. the Sheriffs, and a numerous assemblage of gentlemen, some of the most distinguished for wealth and talent in Bristol. The company met their Chief Magistrate at the Council IIouse, and thence proceeded with a band of music, and the insignia of the city, to the ground; and afterward returned in similar procession to the Merchants’ Halls to dinner.

In April 1871, the Bristol Institution merged with the Bristol Library Society and on 1st April 1872, a new combined museum and library building in Venetian Gothic style was opened at the top of Park Street. The lease on the former Bishop’s College building next door, which had been the Library Society's home since 1855, passed to the local army reserve unit, whose drill hall lay behind it; it became the Victoria (later Salisbury) Club and a restaurant. The old Institution building was sold to the Freemasons.

Although the new building was extended in 1877, by the 1890s the Museum and Library Association was struggling financially, and even unable to pay its curator, Edward Wilson (1848—1898). Negotiations with the city government culminated in the transfer of the whole organization and premises to Bristol city government on 31st May 1894. Wilson remained Curator until his death – only this time he was actually paid! However in June 1899 the site of the Salisbury Club was offered for sale to the city, the tobacco baron, Sir William Henry Wills (1830—1911, later Lord Winterstoke) offering £10,000 to help buy the site and build a new City Art Gallery on it.

Designed by Sir Frederick Wills in an Edwardian Baroque style work on the new building started in 1901, and opened in February 1905. This is the building that is illustrated on the above postcard. It was built in a rectangular open plan in two sections each consisting of a large hall with barrel-vaulted glazed roofs, separated by a double staircase. It incorporated a Museum of Antiquities, as it had been decided during the planning stage that Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities should be grouped with art in the new structure, rather than remaining with the natural history collections that remained in the old building. Interestingly, stone tools continued to reside with the geology collections within natural history. Yet more space became available to museum displays when Bristol Central Library moved down the hill to College Green in 1906.

The vacant rooms were reconstructed as invertebrate and biology galleries. A Bristol Biplane replica hangs from the ceiling of the main hall of the Museum. This aircraft was made in 1963 for the film "Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines". In 1913, the army reserve's drill hall, which now lay between the rear of the Art Gallery and the rapidly expanding University of Bristol, was purchased by the two institutions, three-fifths of the complex falling to the Museum and Art Gallery, the rest to the University. Unfortunately, the outbreak of war in 1914 put paid to any plans for new building; indeed, the Upper Museum Room (geology) was cleared in 1916 to became a "Soldiers Room" to entertain convalescents and the Egyptian Room served for reading and writing and for the delivery of special demonstrations.

However, after being used for storage for over a decade, it proved possible to demolish the Drill Hall to permit a rearward extension of the Art Gallery. This was funded by Sir George Alfred Wills (1854-1928, a cousin of Lord Winterstoke) and completed in 1930. The 1872/1877 Museum building was gutted by fire following a bomb hit on the night of 24/25th November 1940, during the Bristol Blitz, some 17,000 of the natural history specimens being lost. The 1930 extension of the Art Gallery was also hit, but luckily escaped the conflagration, although suffering badly from blast damage. Nevertheless, the Art Gallery partially reopened in February 1941, now also housing some of the Museum's surviving material on a "temporary" basis. Although now housed in the same building, from April 1945, the Museum and Art Gallery were formally split into separate institutions with the lower floor becoming the Museum and the upper floors the Art Gallery. As part of this restructuring, the archaeology and anthropology collections were transferred from the Art Gallery to the Museum.

In February 1947, the remains of the old Museum building (with the exception of the undamaged lecture theatre) were sold to Bristol University: it was then rebuilt as its dining rooms, later becoming Brown's Restaurant. The sale of the building in 1947 reflected the intention that new premises would soon be provided for the Museum and the Art Gallery; planning began in 1951, but then dragged on for the next twenty years, during which time the old buildings received minimal attention, other than the insertion of mezzanines to gain additional space.

Sources:

Annals of Philosophy
Bristol City Museum And Art Gallery: History
Masonic Quarterly Magazine

This page created 13th December 2009, last modified 10th February 2010


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