Guildhall Art Gallery Definition
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Guildhall is a building in the City of London, off Gresham and Basinghall streets, in the wards of Bassishaw and Cheap. It has been used as a town hall for several hundred years, and is still the ceremonial and administrative centre of the City of London and its Corporation. The term Guildhall refers both to the whole building and to its main room, which is a medieval-style great hall. Guildhall complex houses the offices of the City of London Corporation and various public facilities. The building is traditionally referred to as Guildhall never "the" Guildhall.Guildhall should not be confused with London City Hall, which is the administrative centre for Greater London, of which the City of London is only a geographically small part.The Guildhall Art Gallery houses the art collection of the City of London, England. It occupies a building that was completed in 1999 to replace an earlier building destroyed in The Blitz in 1941. It is a stone building in a semi-gothic style intended to be sympathetic to the historic Guildhall, which is adjacent and to which it is connected internally.The gallery was originally built in 1885 to house art collections from the City of London Corporation and the present collection consists of about 4,000 works, of which around 250 are on display at any one time. Many of the paintings are of London themes. There is also a significant collection of Victorian era art, including Pre-Raphaelites, which features paintings by artists such as John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Abraham Solomon, Edward John Poynter and Edwin Landseer, and a view of Salisbury Cathedral by John Constable. The centrepiece of the largest gallery is John Singleton Copley's huge painting The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar.
The Guildhall complex was built on the site of London's Roman amphitheatre, and some of the remains of this are displayed in situ in a room in the basement of the art gallery. Discovered in 1998, the site is now a protected monument. It is under the Guildhall Art Gallery. London's first Roman amphitheatre was built in AD70 from wood but was renovated in the early 2nd century with tiled entrances and rag-stone walls. The amphitheatre was used for various public events such as gladiator games, entertaining soldiers and the public with animal fighting and public execution of criminals, as well as religious activities. When the ancient Romans left in the 4th century the amphitheatre lay derelict for hundreds of years. In the 11th century the area was reoccupied and by the 12th century the first Guildhall was built next to it.The great hall is believed to be on a site of an earlier Guildhall (one possible derivation for the word 'guildhall' is the Anglo-Saxon 'gild', meaning payment, with a "gild-hall" being where citizens would pay their taxes). During the Roman period, it was the site of an amphitheatre, the largest in Britannia, partial remains of which are on public display in the basement of Guildhall Art Gallery and the outline of whose arena is marked with a black circle on the paving of the courtyard in front of the hall. Indeed, the siting of the Saxon Guildhall here was probably due to the amphitheatre's remains[1] Excavations by MOLAS in 2000 at the entrance to Guildhall Yard exposed remains of the great 13th-century gatehouse built directly over the southern entrance to the Roman amphitheatre, which raises the possibility that enough of the Roman structure survived to influence the siting not only of the gatehouse and Guildhall itself but also of the church of St Lawrence Jewry whose strange alignment may shadow the elliptical form of the amphitheatre beneath.[2] The first documentary reference to a London Guildhall is dated 1128 and the current hall's west crypt may be part of a late-13th century building. Legendary British history made Guildhall's site the site of the palace of Brutus of Troy.
Guildhall Art Gallery
Guildhall Art Gallery
Guildhall Art Gallery
Guildhall Art Gallery
Guildhall Art Gallery
Guildhall Art Gallery
Guildhall Art Gallery
Guildhall Art Gallery
Guildhall Art Gallery
Guildhall Art Gallery
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