The story
The plans, letters and tools of James Watt, the engineer whose improvements to the steam engine helped drive the Industrial Revolution, are kept in the town where he was born, at the McLean Museum and Art Gallery in Greenock on the Firth of Clyde. After a refurbishment costing about two million pounds, the museum reopened in November 2019 together with the neighbouring Watt Library, under the shared name of the Watt Institution.
The building opened in 1876, paid for by James McLean, a local timber merchant, who was too ill to attend the opening and died the following January. The collection is older. It grew from the curiosities gathered by the Greenock Philosophical Society, which became a museum in 1816. Beside the Watt material, visitors find Egyptian antiquities, the maritime history of a shipbuilding town and natural history.
The art gallery holds some 430 oil paintings, most of them Scottish and British, with a small group of French pictures. Eugène Boudin, the Normandy painter of harbours and skies, is represented by scenes that include a boatyard at Trouville and a misty view of Bordeaux. Gustave Courbet's Winter at Ornans shows his home town in eastern France in the cold season, and Camille Corot's Evening, the Dance of the Nymphs hangs in the same group.
