Museums - Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum

Situated in Glasgow's Kelvingrove Park, the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum opened in 1901. The history of the museum reaches back to the middle of the nineteenth century, when the institution's previous incarnation, the Kelvingrove Museum, was housed at a small mansion called Kelvingrove House. The building was acquired by the Glasgow Corporation in 1870 to house historical and scientific objects, but was later abandoned in favor of a new, larger building designed to contain the collective bulk of the city's art and museum collections. Funding for the building was generated by the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1888, and construction began in 1897 based on designs by John W. Simpson and E. J. Milner Allen. Another International Exhibition was held at Kelvingrove in 1901, many exhibits from which were transferred to the new Art Gallery and Museum, along with the art collection from the McLellan Galleries and the scientific collection from Kelvingrove House. The newly enriched Art Gallery and Museum opened in 1902. The museum closed in 2003 to undergo a three-year restoration project, and reopened in 2006.
Today the museum at Kelvingrove holds collections in archaeology, Egyptology, natural history, arms and armor, European sculpture, ethnography, and paleontology. The ethnographic works on display (which represent only a fraction of the museum's complete collection, which dates back to the original Kelvingrove Museum of the 1870s) comprise nearly 800 objects from Africa, Oceania, Asia, and the Americas. Many of them were acquired by explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists around the world, including such notable figures as David Livingstone.
The museum's Oceanic collections date primarily from the nineteenth century and include an important group of 150 objects from New Guinea and the Torres Strait Islands that was donated by Robert Bruce in 1889. Native North American materials include objects from Eastern Woodlands, Plains, Southwest Pueblo, and Canadian Northwest Coast tribes, as well as a group of Inuit and Aleut Eskimo items. In 1901, the museum purchased an important collection of fifty-five Eskimo and Northwest Coast objects from Mrs. E. M. Wilkie of Edinburgh, which she had acquired in Alaska, where her brother-in-law was a bishop. The museum's African collection contains objects from West, Central, East, and South Africa, some of which were acquired by explorer, missionary, and naturalist David Livingstone and were bequeathed to the original Kelvingrove Museum in the 1870s. An important group of twenty-seven objects from the southeast Congo was donated to the museum in 1907 by Joseph Moloney, who had collected them in the 1890s.