The story
York Art Gallery opened in 1879 in a red-brick Italianate building just outside the medieval city walls, put up for a grand art and industry exhibition and kept on afterwards. For a long time its defining figure was a local man, William Etty, the York-born painter famous, and in Victorian times often notorious, for his large canvases of nudes. The gallery holds the fullest collection of his work anywhere.
Since a major rebuild reopened it in 2015, its other strength has taken centre stage. The Centre of Ceramic Art on the upper floor shows one of Britain's great collections of studio pottery, thousands of pieces of 20th-century and contemporary ceramics.
Etty still watches over the entrance, his statue standing outside the gallery he never lived to see, in the city whose walls and rooftops he spent his life painting.
