Manchester Art Gallery

Manchester founded this gallery in the 1820s, just as it was becoming the first great industrial city, in a Greek-revival building by Charles Barry, the architect who would later design the Houses of Parliament in London. It began as a private institution for the city's manufacturers and passed into public hands in 1882.

Its strength is Victorian painting, above all the Pre-Raphaelites, the young rebels who wanted art to reach back past Raphael to something sharper and brighter. Ford Madox Brown's crowded street scene "Work" is here, along with Holman Hunt and Rossetti, and a good collection of British watercolours in the rooms nearby. These are pictures made in the same decades, and often the same country, that Manchester's mills were busily remaking.