The story
Sudley House is the rare survival of a Victorian merchant's art collection still hanging in the merchant's own home. George Holt, a Liverpool shipowner, moved into this villa in the leafy suburb of Aigburth in 1884 and filled its ground-floor rooms with the pictures he bought over the following years.
Because his daughter Emma left the house and everything in it to the city of Liverpool in 1944, the collection stayed where he had put it. You see Turner, Gainsborough and Reynolds, a Millais, and Pre-Raphaelite work by Burne-Jones, hung in furnished period rooms rather than white galleries, much as a wealthy family of the 1890s would have lived with them.
The house is now run by National Museums Liverpool, and like the city's other museums it is free to enter.
