The story
The most valuable picture owned by this Lancashire seaside town arrived on loan long before it became a gift. Henry Fuseli, the Swiss-born painter who made his career in London, painted The Vision of Catherine of Aragon in 1781 for a baronet, Sir Robert Smyth. It shows the dying queen from Shakespeare's Henry VIII at the moment of her deathbed vision. The canvas stayed with Smyth's family until 1878, was lent to the town council in the early 1930s by the Tiller family, descendants of a later owner, and became the town's own in 1950, when Alderman James Herbert Dawson bought it and gave it to the collection.
Gifts built the whole collection. It began in 1925, when a local benefactor, John Booth, presented Herd Lassie by Richard Ansdell, the Victorian animal painter, and it now runs to more than 240 works, around 25 of them by Ansdell. Fylde Council looks after it, much of it at the Town Hall, and since January 2025 exhibitions drawn from it have been shown in the 16th-century Long Gallery of Lytham Hall.
