The story
Gallery Oldham keeps the civic collection of a Lancashire cotton town that started buying and receiving art in the 1880s. Oldham began building its first library and museum on Union Street in 1883, and in 1888 the collector Charles Lees gave the town a large group of paintings, watercolours, drawings and engravings. The collection is still strongest in Victorian and Edwardian art, including work by William Stott of Oldham, the local painter known by his hometown's name.
Since 2002 the collection has had a new home, a building by the architects Pringle Richards Sharratt that was later joined by the town library. The displays mix art with Oldham's social and natural history and with modern British work.
Its best-known painting is John William Waterhouse's Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses, from 1891. It belongs to the town but is not always on show, since the displays change. In it the sorceress from Homer's Odyssey holds out a drugged cup from her throne, and Ulysses himself appears only as a reflection in the round mirror behind her.
