Qualla: Walker Art Gallery

Walker Art Gallery: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Chowells at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0. It started with a banker who went bankrupt. In 1819, the Liverpool Royal Institution bought 37 paintings from William Roscoe - poet, abolitionist, and failed banker - whose collection had been saved from auction by friends scrambling to keep his beloved Italian Renaissance pictures together. Those thirty-seven paintings became the founding nucleus of what is now the Walker Art Gallery: a vast neoclassical pile on William Brown Street, opened in 1877 by the Earl of Derby and named for the Scottish brewer who paid for it. The Walker today holds one of the largest collections of art in England outside London, and the building it sits in - all Corinthian columns, lion-flanked steps, and high galleried halls - is itself a Grade II* listed monument to Victorian municipal swagger.

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Image: The original uploader was Chowells at English Wikipedia. | CC BY-SA 3.0

Walker Art Gallery: A Gift from the Beer Trade

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit XeresNelro, CC BY-SA 4.0. Sir Andrew Barclay Walker was born in Ayrshire in 1824 and made his fortune in beer. The family brewery, founded in Scotland, expanded south and Walker eventually settled in Gateacre in Liverpool. By the 1870s he was mayor of the city and rich enough to fund a permanent home for ...

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Image: XeresNelro | CC BY-SA 4.0

Walker Art Gallery: Pre-Raphaelites and a Banksy

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William Frederick Yeames, Public domain. The Walker's collection is unusually deep in nineteenth-century British painting. W. F. Yeames' "And When Did You Last See Your Father?" - the Cavalier child being interrogated by Roundhead soldiers, a Victorian schoolbook image for generations of British children - hangs here. S...

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Image: William Frederick Yeames | Public domain

Walker Art Gallery: Painting Competition and Refurbishment

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jonathan Deamer, CC0. The first John Moores Painting Prize was held at the Walker in 1957. Sponsored by Sir John Moores - the Liverpool entrepreneur who built the Littlewoods football pools and mail-order empire - it has run every two years since and is the biggest painting prize in the United Kingdom...

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Image: Jonathan Deamer | CC0