Housed in a Grade II* listed building, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery is situated in the city's bustling commercial centre.
The museum first opened in 1885 and includes more than 40 galleries, covering fine art, costume and jewellery, social history, archaeology and ethnography.
The art gallery is famous for its Pre-Raphaelite paintings, which are part of the largest public Pre-Raphaelite collection in the world. Many of the works were amassed when the gallery first opened. At the time, local industrialists and politicians were keen to help boost the city's collections with works by living artists.
You can also see art and objects spanning centuries of European and World history and culture, including artefacts from Ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt.
Permanent collection
The gallery's unrivalled Pre-Raphaelite collection includes more than 2,000 works, ranging from oil paintings, tapestries, drawings, sketchbooks, stained glass and related cartoons, to prints, illustrated books, watercolours, ceramics, and archive material. On display are works by the founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt – as well as the slightly older Ford Madox Brown and the Birmingham-born Edward Burne-Jones.
Highlights include The Long Engagement by Arthur Hughes (1859), The Annunciation by Edward Burne-Jones (1857–61), Proserpine by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1882), The Blind Girl by John Everett Millais and Holman Hunt's The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple.
Roman coins, antique earthenware, ancient figurines and jewellery, African masks, carvings and musical instruments are all on show within the vast Antiquities and Ethnography collections. The Applied Art and Social History collections reflect Birmingham's industrial heritage with key objects by leading makers from the West Midlands, as well as important pieces from around the world.
Myriad topographical views of the city can also be seen. From oil paintings to pencil drawings, engravings and lithographs, these scenes show the changing face of a city that was once at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution.
