Artistic impression

Between February and June, there’s a rare opportunity to appreciate the work of several great English landscape painters, including David Cox, Joseph Turner and John Constable, during an exhibition at the Worcester City Art Gallery & Museum

The art store at Worcester City Art Gallery & Museum is home to just over half of a magnificent Sale Bequest of Victorian watercolors, including work by David Cox, Peter De Wint and Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding, among other significant names. The other half of this collection belongs to the British Museum. Uncovering how the collection came to be split in this way has led exhibition curator, Emalee Beddoes, into the back rooms of the British Museum, leafing through pipe smoke-scented books of letters and meeting minutes from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

These letters begin in 1897 after the death of Reverend Charles Sale of Holt Heath, Worcestershire, who left his impressive collection of watercolors first to his wife, Mary Sale then, on her death, to the British Museum. Rev. Sale also left a set of instructions outlining what the British Museum may do with artworks it did not select for its collection, offering a series of alternative national collections that may consider the work, and his final note is that anything remaining should be offered to the Worcester Corporation.