Qualla: Holburne Museum

Holburne Museum: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daniel Moden, CC BY-SA 2.0. Sir William Holburne was a second son who became a baronet because of a battle. His elder brother Francis died at the Battle of Bayonne in 1814, and at twenty-seven William inherited a title and a family collection of Chinese armorial porcelain, silver and portraits. He could have left it at that. Instead he spent the next half-century buying maiolica, Old Master paintings, snuff boxes, gems and Roman glass with a connoisseur's eye, and when he died in 1874 his sister Mary Anne carried out his wish: she founded a museum in his name. It opened in 1882 as Bath's first public art gallery. The building had once been a Georgian pleasure-garden hotel where ladies took breakfast at noon, and on summer evenings the gardens behind were lit with thousands of lamps and fireworks lit the sky.

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Image: Daniel Moden | CC BY-SA 2.0

Holburne Museum: A Pleasure-Garden Hotel

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Neiljforsyth, CC BY-SA 4.0. The building was not designed for art. Thomas Baldwin drew up the first plans in 1794 - a two-storey building to serve the new Sydney Gardens, the only surviving eighteenth-century pleasure gardens in the country. Baldwin went bankrupt before construction began. The job passed to...

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Image: Neiljforsyth | CC BY-SA 4.0

Holburne Museum: Sir William's Eye

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RichardLucking, CC BY-SA 4.0. Holburne's collecting taste was unfashionable in its breadth. He bought what he liked rather than what was in vogue - Italian maiolica when the Victorians were obsessing over Pre-Raphaelites, Old Masters when others chased modern landscapes, miniatures when miniatures had fallen ...

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Image: RichardLucking | CC BY-SA 4.0

Holburne Museum: The Modernist Extension

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ham, CC BY-SA 3.0. By the late 2000s the museum needed more space, and the proposal was contentious. The architect Eric Parry RA designed a three-storey extension that pointedly refused to imitate Georgian Bath. Instead of Bath stone and pilasters, Parry used vertical mullions of brown-green mottle...

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Image: Ham | CC BY-SA 3.0

Holburne Museum: On Screen

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rose and Trev Clough, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Holburne has had a second career as a film set. It stood in for the Devonshire villa in the 2008 film The Duchess, with Keira Knightley sweeping through what was once a Georgian breakfast room. It played Steyne's mansion in Vanity Fair, the 2004 adaptation starring Reese With...

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Image: Rose and Trev Clough | CC BY-SA 2.0