RA Collection: People and Organisations
The Guildhall Art Gallery was originally built in 1885 to house art collections from the City of London Corporation. It currently occupies a building designed by the architect Richard Gilbert Scott (1923–2017) that was completed in 1999 to replace an earlier building destroyed in The Blitz in 1941. It is a stone building in a semi-gothic style intended to be sympathetic to the historic Guildhall, which is adjacent and to which it is connected internally.
The collection consists of about 4000 works, of which around 250 are on display at any one time. Many of the paintings are of London themes. There is also a significant collection of Victorian art, including Pre-Raphaelites, including paintings by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Abraham Solomon, Edward John Poynter and Edwin Landseer. The centrepiece of the largest gallery is John Singleton Copley's huge painting The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar.
Corporation of the City of London
Catalogue of the loan collection of pictures / prepared by A.G. Temple - London: 1895
14/391
Corporation of the City of London
Guildhall Art Gallery : catalogue of works by Naval and Military artists of Great Britain and her allies, France, Russia and Belgium / with descriptive and biographical notes by A.G. Temple - London: 1915
18/1100