The story
When German bombs fell on Coventry in November 1940, the city's new art gallery existed only as a basement. The machine-tool manufacturer Sir Alfred Herbert had given £100,000 for it in 1938, building began in 1939, and the war stopped it. He laid the foundation stone again in May 1954, added a second £100,000, and the Herbert finally opened in March 1960, close to the ruins of the medieval cathedral.
That neighbour shapes the collection. When the architect Basil Spence designed the new cathedral, he asked the painter Graham Sutherland for a huge tapestry of Christ in Glory to hang behind the altar. Sutherland worked on it for about ten years, and the Herbert holds more than 150 of his studies, including his first two designs for the whole hanging, given in 1964 by Lord Iliffe, whose family owned the local newspaper.
The city's own legend is here too. John Collier's Lady Godiva of 1897 shows the 11th-century noblewoman who, the story goes, rode naked through Coventry to free its people from a heavy tax, and it is one of the best-known paintings in the building. Other galleries turn to Coventry's working past, including the silk ribbon weaving that was once one of its main trades.
