A história
When the Laing Art Gallery opened in Newcastle in 1904, it had a building and almost nothing to hang in it. Its founder, Alexander Laing, was a Scottish wine and spirit merchant who had done well in the city and wanted to give something back, but he collected no art himself. He simply trusted that the people of Newcastle would fill the walls. He died the next year.
They did fill them. The Laing now holds the largest collection anywhere of John Martin, a local-born painter of vast, apocalyptic scenes of cities swallowed by fire and flood. Nearby hangs Holman Hunt's Isabella and the Pot of Basil, the Pre-Raphaelite picture of a young woman cradling the pot where she has buried her murdered lover's head.
