Qualla: Tate Britain

Tate Britain: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Wilkie, Public domain. Before the Tate, there was a prison. Millbank Penitentiary opened in 1816 as Britain's largest jail - a six-pointed star of brick covering eighteen acres on the marshy north bank of the Thames, where prisoners awaited transportation to Australia. They walked down the steps now called Convict Steps and were rowed out to ships moored in midstream. Cholera killed more inmates than the courts did. The prison was demolished in 1890. On the cleared site, in 1893, a sugar refiner named Henry Tate began funding a new building. He had made his fortune patenting the sugar cube. He had collected British paintings as a hobby. He wanted Britain to have a national gallery dedicated to its own artists. On 21 July 1897, the gallery opened as the National Gallery of British Art. From the start, everybody just called it the Tate.

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Image: David Wilkie | Public domain

Tate Britain: Sugar, Stone, and a Domed Portico

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0. Sidney R. J. Smith designed the front facade with a classical portico and a low dome behind it, a polite Beaux-Arts pile that does not pretend to be a Greek temple but cannot quite help itself. John Russell Pope - the American architect who later designed Washington's Jefferson M...

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Image: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK | CC BY 2.0

Tate Britain: Turner's Bequest

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PAUL FARMER, CC BY-SA 2.0. When J. M. W. Turner died in 1851 he left a will of extraordinary generosity and equally extraordinary vagueness. He wanted the nation to have all the work he still owned at his death - about 180 oil paintings, 19,000 drawings and watercolours, dozens of notebooks. The family con...

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Image: PAUL FARMER | CC BY-SA 2.0

Tate Britain: What's on the Walls

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Tate Britain holds the most comprehensive collection of British art in the world. Only the Yale Center for British Art rivals it in breadth, and Yale cannot match the depth. Walk the rooms chronologically and you walk five centuries: the anonymous seventeenth-century Cholmondeley...

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Image: Public domain

Tate Britain: Floods, Bombs, and Boycotts

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fred Romero from Paris, France, CC BY 2.0. The gallery has had crises. In 1928 the Thames broke its banks and flooded the basement, damaging paintings. During the Second World War most of the collection was secretly evacuated - more than 700 artworks transported to Muncaster Castle in Cumbria on 24 August 1939, just befor...

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Image: Fred Romero from Paris, France | CC BY 2.0