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Tate Britain http://www.tate.org.uk/britain

Tate Britain is the national gallery of British art. Located in London, it is one of the family of four Tate galleries which display selections from the Tate Collection. The other three galleries are Tate Modern, also in London, Tate Liverpool, in the north-west, and Tate St Ives, in Cornwall, in the south-west. The entire Tate Collection is available online.

Tate Britain is the world centre for the understanding and enjoyment of British art and works actively to promote interest in British art internationally. The displays at Tate Britain call on the greatest collection of British art in the world to present an unrivalled picture of the development of art in Britain from the time of the Tudor monarchs in the sixteenth century, to the present day.

The Collection comprises the national collection of British art from the year 1500 to the present day, and international modern art. Some of the highlights of the Tate collection of British art include rich holdings of portraiture from the age of Queen Elizabeth I; of the work of William Hogarth, sometimes called the father of English painting; of the eighteenth-century portraitists Gainsborough and Reynolds; of the animal painter George Stubbs; of the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who revolutionised British art in the nineteenth century; and in the twentieth century of the work of Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Francis Bacon and the Young British Artists (YBAs) of the 1990s. The very latest contemporary art is presented through the Art Now programme and the annual Turner Prize exhibition.

Special attention is given to these three outstanding British artists from the Romantic age. Blake and Constable have dedicated spaces within the gallery, while the unique Turner Collection  of about 300 paintings and many thousands of watercolours is housed in the specially built Clore Gallery. See Turner Online for more information on Turner.

The displays at Tate Britain feature selections from the Tate collection of British art arranged in a broad chronological sweep from 1500 to the present. Within this chronology individual rooms explore particular themes or show one artist in depth. In order to show the full riches of the collection, displays are changed on an annual basis. These changes are made possible by the support of BP. Each room has an introductory text and each work has a short introductory caption.

The building that is now Tate Britain was opened in 1897. Its site was by the River Thames on Millbank a slightly out of the way area of central London. The site had previously been occupied by a large prison. Its official title then was the National Gallery of British Art and as such it was the fulfilment of the dream of the collector and sugar magnate, Henry Tate, who paid for the building and endowed it with his own collection of British art. Almost immediately it became popularly known as the Tate Gallery, a title officially confirmed in 1932. This was necessary not least because in 1917 the Gallery had been given the additional responsibility of forming a national collection of international modern art, thus ceasing to be exclusively the National Gallery of British Art.

Originally occupying only a small part of its site, the Gallery continually expanded to accommodate the growth of its twin collections. The final quarter of the site was filled in 1979 and the Gallery then took over the redundant military hospital across the street to the east, together with the street. This new space permitted the building of the Clore Gallery for the Turner Collection, opened in 1987, which finally provided proper housing for the Turner Bequest of 300 oil paintings and many thousands of watercolours by Britain's great Romantic artist, JMW Turner. Some of the hospital buildings were listed for preservation and became office accomodation, thus freeing up space in the original building.

By about 1990 it had become clear to the Tate that its collection of British and international modern art had greatly outgrown the building, and indeed the possibilities of the whole site on Millbank. Even the creation of two regional Tate galleries, Tate Liverpool in 1988 and Tate St Ives in 1993 did not solve the problem. It was decided to create a new gallery in London and to display in it the international modern component of the Tate Collection. This became Tate Modern, which opened in the year 2000. The beauty of this scheme was that the building on Millbank could once again become the national gallery of British art, to be known as Tate Britain, thus reverting to Henry Tate's original dream and finally fulfilling it. In preparation for this a major rebuilding of the north-west quarter of the Gallery was undertaken, creating a new entrance and spaces for temporary exhibitions as well as new galleries for the display of the Collection. At the same time the Hyman Kreitman Research Centre was created to bring together and make accessible the Tate Library and Archive.

Art Museums : England : London

Tate Britain

July 15, 2008 02:48:27 PM

Millbank

London

London

SW1P 4RG

+44 20 7887 8888