Walsall Art Gallery

The gallery houses art works collected since the foundation of Walsall Museum and Art Gallery in 1892. The permanent collection now comprises more than 1700 works acquired by bequests, donations and by purchases. Perhaps twenty-five percent of the collection is topographical, with the emphasis on Walsall and its people and environs. There is a large group of late Victorian paintings, prints and drawings such as W.P. Frith, Thomas Faed and Briton Riviere. Over a hundred works are modern prints by well-known artists from 1960's to the present day and include works by Richard Hamilton and John Piper. The New Art Gallery was built with £21 million of public funding, including £15.75 million from the UK National Lottery and was opened in January 2000, replacing the town's old gallery.

It is now the home of the distinguished Garman Ryan Collection, donated to the gallery in 1972 by Lady Kathleen Epstein. It consists of three hundred and sixty-five works of art, over a third of them being three-dimensional works from many different cultures and periods around the world. It also contains a wide ranging body of the work of Jacob Epstein and many significant works by European artists such as Van Gogh, Monet, Turner, Corot, Renoir and Constable represented in prints, sketches and drawings as well as paintings and sculptures. This is a closed collection meaning that no works will be added to it. The Garman Ryan Epstein Collection was formed in 1996 with the intention of creating a partnership collection to the Garman Ryan. This important collection holds modernist works by Augustus John, Amedeo Modigliani, Gaudier-Brzeska and Lucian Freud, amongst others. Walsall has developed its contemporary collection, acquiring a number of important works though the donations of the Contemporary Art Society. Works include those by Gavin Turk, and Mike Nelson.