Qualla: Wolverhampton Art Gallery

Wolverhampton Art Gallery: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Æthelred, CC BY-SA 3.0. On a frieze along Lichfield Street, sixteen stone figures still go about their work - a sculptor with chisel, a potter at the wheel, a glass-blower mid-breath, a smith bent over an anvil. The carvings were Wolverhampton's argument to itself in 1884: that a town built on coal and locks and japanned tin trays could also be a town of art. Philip Horsman, a local builder who had made his fortune raising chapels and warehouses, paid for the gallery out of his own pocket. The municipal authority gave the land. The Birmingham architect Julius Chatwin shipped in pale Bath stone from Somerset and propped the entrance on six columns of red granite. When the doors opened that May, the Black Country had its first picture house.

Image: Æthelred | CC BY-SA 3.0

Wolverhampton Art Gallery: A Flemish Stranger on Lichfield Street

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bs0u10e01, CC BY-SA 4.0. The gallery's most surprising treasure has nothing to do with Wolverhampton. In 1614, the Antwerp Guild of Old Crossbowmen commissioned the Flemish painter Abraham Janssens to make a companion piece to a Rubens, a great allegorical canvas called Peace and Plenty Binding the Arrow...

Image: Bs0u10e01 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wolverhampton Art Gallery: Pop Art in the Midlands

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roger D Kidd, CC BY-SA 2.0. Skip forward eight decades, and Wolverhampton was quietly building one of the most adventurous pop art collections outside London. From the late 1960s onwards, curators acquired prints and canvases by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Peter Blake, David Hockney, Eduardo Paolozzi, Cl...

Image: Roger D Kidd | CC BY-SA 2.0

Wolverhampton Art Gallery: Bearing Witness to the Troubles

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oosoom at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. In a quieter room, the gallery holds something even rarer: a permanent display devoted to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The collection gathers work by Willie Doherty, Rita Duffy, Jock McFadyen, John Keane, Siobhan Hapaska and Robert Priseman, artists who lived through three d...

Image: Oosoom at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Wolverhampton Art Gallery: Bilston Enamels and a Bargain in Japan

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P L Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. The gallery's other identity is local and granular. Cabinets brim with japanned ware - lacquered tin trays painted with butterflies and pagodas - and with Bilston enamels, the small painted boxes that once made the Midlands famous. In October 1924 a councillor named Davis Green p...

Image: P L Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0

Wolverhampton Art Gallery: Twelve Thousand Things

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit G-Man, Public domain. By 2009 the collection numbered around 12,000 artefacts: paintings from the 17th to 20th centuries, drawings, Eastern applied art, ceramics and glass, dolls and toys, even Dr John Fraser's box of geological specimens. The 2006-07 refurbishment by Purcell pushed new exhibition win...

Image: G-Man | Public domain