Museums - Plymouth City Museum & Art Gallery

The Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery has been actively collecting since 1897 and has grown chiefly through donations and bequests from Plymouth citizens. The museum's collections cover English and European painting and decorative arts, natural history, archaeology of England and the Mediterranean, and ethnographic art.
Displayed in new galleries constructed during refurbishment in 2008 and 2009, the ethnological collections contain objects from Asia, Oceania, Africa, and the Americas, as well as Europe. Comprising some 3,700 objects, the collections contain several important groups of material. A collection of New Guinean objects collected by Henry Moore Dauncey, who worked for the London Missionary Society in the region between 1888 and 1928, has been described as one of the best collections of such material in Britain, and the collection of African works amassed by pioneering explorer Gertrude Benham, donated in 1935, is also particularly noteworthy. Several smaller collections of importance include a group of objects from the Lengua people of Paraguay, collected by William Fosterjohn between 1899 and 1903, as well as a group of ten argillite carvings from the northwest coast of Canada and significant collections of southeast African beadwork and Polynesian material.