Museum & Art Swindon

Museum & Art Swindon, formerly Swindon Museum and Art Gallery, holds one of the most important collections of modern British art in the country.

It features impressive and thought-provoking works by some of Britain’s finest modern artists, including Lucien Freud, Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, Alfred Wallis and LS Lowry, alongside an important collection of studio ceramics.

The collection was established in the 1940s with the donation of 21 works by local businessman HJP Bomford, which included two drawings by Henry Moore, paintings by Graham Sutherland and an important abstract work by Ben Nicholson.

Over the last seventy years, Swindon has continued to collect the best of British art, working closely with the Contemporary art society, Art Fund and other supporters to acquire examples of almost every major movement in British art, from traditional portraits by Spencer Gore and Mark Gertler, landscape paintings by Richard Nevinson and John Nash, through to examples of British abstraction by Roger Hilton and Terry Frost and Pop Art by Richard Hamilton. Contemporary artists in the collection include Maggi Hambling, Richard Long, Stephen Pippin, Lisa Milroy and Gillian Ayres.