England Guide
The Northwest
Walker Art Gallery
Opening time: Daily 10am–5pm
Price: Free
Address: William Brown Street
Website: www.thewalker.org.uk
Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery houses one of Britain's best provincial art collections. The art is up on the first floor, but don't miss the ground-floor Sculpture Gallery, nor the Craft and Design Gallery, which displays changing exhibits from a large applied-art collection – glassware, ceramics, fabrics, precious metals and furniture, largely retrieved from the homes of the city's early industrial businessmen.
Liverpool's explosive economic growth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is reflected in much of the Walker's collection, as British painting begins to occupy centre stage – notably works by George Stubbs, England's greatest animal painter (and native Liverpudlian). Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, including Degas, Sickert, Cézanne and Monet, drag the collection into more modern times and tastes, before the final round of galleries of contemporary British art. Paul Nash, Lucian Freud, Ben Nicholson, David Hockney and John Hoyland all have work here, much of it first displayed in the Walker's biennial John Moores Exhibition.