Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, is one of the UK’s finest regional museums. Opened in 1927, the gallery was gifted to the city by T.R. Ferens, a local industrialist who established a purchasing fund that has allowed its permanent collection to grow in quality and range. Today this includes works by Canaletto, Frans Hals, Henry Moore, and David Hockney.
As part of Hull City Council’s £80m cultural capital programme, and in preparation for Hull’s term as UK City of Culture 2017, Ferens Art Gallery closed in September 2015 to allow a £4.5m renovation project to take place. The gallery is set to reopen in early 2017 with new environmental controls for its permanent collection and temporary exhibition galleries.
A highlight of the redisplayed permanent collection at Ferens Art Gallery will be a rare early Sienese gold-ground painting by Pietro Lorenzetti, ‘Christ between Saints Paul and Peter’ of about 1320. Since its purchase by the gallery in 2013, the panel has been undergoing conservation treatment at the National Gallery, and curatorial trainee Lucy West has been carrying out research into the work. The painting will form part of a new gallery of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art.
During the period of closure, six works from Ferens Art Gallery are on display at the National Gallery:
- Philippe de Champaigne, The Annunciation
- Marcus Geeraerts the younger, Portrait of a Lady
- Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts, Trompe l'oeil Studio Wall with a Vanitas Still Life
- Frans Hals Portrait of a Young Woman
- Philip Wilson Steer, Boulogne Sands (Children Shrimping)
- Unknown, perhaps Belgian, 19th-century artist, An Unknown Lady