The gallery began as a westward growth of the Municipal Buildings on the Headrow. George Corson designed the original municipal block in 1878–84 to house the public library, and Thorp added the gallery wing between 1886 and 1888. What is now the Tiled Hall Café was originally a sculpture gallery, modified from the library's Reading Room and lit by the new technology of electric light. The other galleries kept their daylight, drawn down through rooflights. At the heart of the new wing stood a two-storey central court with a fountain of Burmantofts faience and a glass roof. The glass roof would disappear under a false ceiling in the 20th century and only re-emerge, almost a hundred years later, in the 2016 renovation.

The gallery hands visitors a leaflet titled Ten Key Works, suggesting a half-hour itinerary through the collection. Edward Armitage's vast Retribution from 1858 hangs alongside Auguste Rodin's The Age of Bronze, cast in 1906 from the 1877 original. Evelyn De Morgan's Valley of Shadows, Jacob Epstein's Maternity, Wyndham Lewis's portrait Praxitella, Henry Moore's 1929 Reclining Figure, Francis Bacon's 1950 Painting, Tony Cragg's Postcard Flag Union Jack from 1981, Antony Gormley's maquette for Brick Man, and Paula Rego's Artist in her Studio. The 20th-century British collection was designated of national importance by the British government in 1997. Other paintings worth tracking down include William Holman Hunt's Shadow of Death, Atkinson Grimshaw's nocturnal Boar Lane Leeds, John William Waterhouse's Lady of Shalott Looking at Lancelot, and Elizabeth Thompson's epic Scotland Forever.

The 2007 reopening was the moment the gallery rediscovered itself. The £1.5 million renovation reopened the Victorian Tiled Hall as a café and bookshop, restoring the connection to Leeds Central Library next door, and renamed the former Queen's Gallery the Ziff Gallery after the businessman and arts patron Arnold Ziff. A second closure, from January 2016 to October 2017, dealt with deeper repairs and uncovered the long-hidden glass roof in the Central Court. Lothar Götz painted an abstract mural across the Victorian staircase, bright against the period stonework. The gallery now also links eastward, by bridge, to the Henry Moore Institute, which shares some of its sculpture collection and amplifies the city's place at the centre of British 20th-century sculpture.

Leeds Art Gallery sits at the centre of a quietly impressive municipal cultural infrastructure. The gallery is owned and administered by Leeds City Council. It is part of the Leeds Museums and Galleries group, the same family that runs Leeds City Museum a couple of streets away. Admission is free. The collection is genuinely public property, bought over more than a century with civic money and private benefactions, and the gallery still acquires new work each year. In the entrance hall, the 1712 statue of Queen Anne, the city's oldest civic sculpture, has been here since the gallery opened and is the marker for everything that followed: a city that decided art belonged to its people, and then kept the promise.