Qualla: Burrell Collection

Burrell Collection: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0. Sir William Burrell never met a beautiful object he could not bring himself to want. The Glasgow shipping magnate spent more than seventy years buying art, on long collecting trips, through dealers, by post, in vast quantities, and across categories that ought to have been incompatible. He acquired Assyrian palace reliefs and Chinese Tang horses and Degas pastels and medieval tapestries and seventeenth-century Persian carpets and Gothic stained glass and Egyptian funerary statues, and he gave essentially all of it, around nine thousand objects, to the city of Glasgow in April 1944. The museum that finally opened to display the gift took almost forty years to build, and another generation later was named Museum of the Year for the second time.

Read more: Burrell Collection on Qualla

Image: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg) | CC BY-SA 4.0

Burrell Collection: A Gift, and Its Conditions

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Johnbod, CC BY-SA 4.0. Burrell signed the memorandum of agreement with Glasgow Corporation in April 1944, in the middle of a world war, and he attached unusual conditions. He wanted his collection housed in a single, distinct building, set in countryside, within four miles of Killearn in Stirlingshire ...

Read more: Burrell Collection on Qualla

Image: Johnbod | CC BY-SA 4.0

Burrell Collection: A Building Built Into a Collection

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Johnbod, CC BY-SA 4.0. The architects' insight was that some pieces in Burrell's collection were architecture themselves. Romanesque doorways, sixteenth-century stone archways, whole reconstructed rooms from the Burrells' home Hutton Castle near Berwick on Tweed; these things wanted to be built into th...

Read more: Burrell Collection on Qualla

Image: Johnbod | CC BY-SA 4.0

Burrell Collection: Nine Thousand Objects, One Eye

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Édouard Manet, Public domain. What ties together a head of a royal attendant from Ashurnasirpal II's North-West Palace at Nimrud, around 880 BCE, and a Manet painting of women drinking beer? Only William Burrell's eye. There are more than 200 tapestries and carpets, including the Wagner Garden Carpet from sev...

Read more: Burrell Collection on Qualla

Image: Édouard Manet | Public domain

Burrell Collection: What Provenance Reveals

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Johnbod, CC BY-SA 4.0. Burrell bought heavily in the 1930s and 1940s, when many works came onto the European market as the result of forced sales by Jewish collectors fleeing Nazi persecution. He did not know, and could not have known, the full story of every transaction. After the UK government establ...

Read more: Burrell Collection on Qualla

Image: Johnbod | CC BY-SA 4.0