Museums - Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery

The Bristol City Museum originated in 1823 as the Bristol Institution for the Advancement of Science and Art. In 1871 the Institution merged with the Bristol Library Society, and in 1872 began its occupation of a new combined museum building on Bristol's Park Street. The museum's current Edwardian Baroque building, opened in 1905, was funded by Sir William Henry Willis and designed by Sir Frederick Willis. The museum's collections, which up to that time had focused on natural history, were expanded to included Classical antiquities. Extensions and expansions came in 1906 and 1930, and the museum received a thorough restructuring during the 1970s.
Today the Bristol City Museum contains collections in natural history, Classical antiquities, European art, Asian art, and ethnographic art. The museum's ethnographic holdings constitute a collection of regional significance, totaling some 10,000 items, the earliest of which were acquired by the museum in the nineteenth century. The objects in the collections represent tribal cultures from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, with strengths in West, Central, and South Africa, Papua New Guinea, Australia, and New Zealand. Important eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century collections include the Goldwyer Collection, which includes early Native American material; the Stewart Collection, comprised mainly of Hudson's Bay items; and groups of Maori wood carvings, Arawak pottery, and Fijian necklaces. Rare highlights include the unique "Stutchbury bird"––a wood carving of unknown type and purpose from Oceania––and a tortoiseshell funerary mask from the Torres Strait.