The story
Look up at the front of Wolverhampton Art Gallery before you go in. A sculpted frieze runs along the Bath stone facade, 16 figures standing for the arts and crafts, painting and sculpture beside architecture, pottery, glassblowing and wrought iron. It suits a town that made its living from metalwork and manufacture. The building was paid for and put up by a local contractor, Philip Horsman, to designs by the Birmingham architect Julius Chatwin, and it opened in May 1884.
Inside, the older collection is British art of the 18th and 19th centuries. The Georgian room shows painters such as Thomas Gainsborough, Joseph Wright of Derby, Johann Zoffany and Henry Fuseli. The collection includes Gainsborough's full-length portrait of Sir Edward Turner, an Oxfordshire baronet. The Victorian rooms carry on with landscapes and narrative pictures.
Then the collection jumps forward. From the late 1960s the gallery made a point of buying Pop Art, and a dedicated gallery now shows American and British Pop, with works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and David Hockney. Another collection gathers art made in response to the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
