The story
Leeds Art Gallery opened in 1888, a Victorian civic gallery for a wealthy industrial city, and for its first decades it bought the safe academic pictures of the day. What changed its character was sculpture. Leeds produced Henry Moore, who studied at the art school here after the First World War, and the city leaned into that, building one of Britain's best collections of 20th-century British sculpture and, next door, a dedicated study centre named for him.
Alongside the Moores and the work of his contemporaries, the gallery holds Victorian paintings and a growing collection of modern British art. The building connects directly to the city's ornate Victorian library and the Henry Moore Institute.
The upstairs galleries sit under restored tiled floors and a grand staircase, part of the civic pride that once put art, books and learning under one roof in the middle of a mill city.
