Dudley Museum and Art Gallery, St James's, Dudley

Summary

Free library, gallery and art school, later museum and gallery, 1883-1884, by Bateman and Corser of Birmingham.

Description

Free library, gallery and art school, later museum and gallery, 1883-1884, by Bateman and Corser of Birmingham.

MATERIALS: constructed from red brick with terracotta dressings, with a slate roof.

PLAN: the building stands on the west corner of the junction of Priory Street and St James’s Road, facing onto the Market Square. It is wedge-shaped on plan, orientated south-east to north-west, tapering to the north-west.

The south-eastern side of the ground floor of the building was the library, converted to use as a museum, while the art gallery occupied the ground floor of the north-western range of the building. Between the two there is a large stair hall and service rooms. The entirety of the first floor was used as the art school. Mezzanines have been inserted on the north-west side of the building.

EXTERIOR: a free Renaissance-style building of two storeys, with a basement and mezzanine. The south-east elevation, facing onto Market Square, is five bays, separated by paired rusticated pilasters. Terracotta dressings form a continuous sill band, and enrich the capitals and entablature. Ground floor windows are tall timber-framed paired casements with two small square leaded lights above, with gauged brick lintels beneath the frieze. The upper floor is blind, with brick panels instead of windows, with a frieze and terracotta cornice. There is a central doorway with a heavily moulded architrave, consisting of paired, fluted pilasters that step upwards and curve outwards, supporting wide, arched consoles and an open pediment containing a moulded emblem. The door itself has three timber panels with circular mouldings and a plain fan light. The corner of the building is canted on the ground floor, and has a pair of arched windows. Affixed in front of the windows is a set of three meteorological instruments in a timber frame. Above, there is a turret with a richly moulded pendant base, with panelling to the first floor, and an octagonal parapet, from which the cupola has been lost. The central panel has an aedicule containing the Dudley Borough Arms.

Consistent treatment applies to the longer elevation onto St James’s Road. In the fifth bay the roofline is broken by a Renaissance-arched window to the first floor with a richly-detailed segmental-arched dormer with a finial. The rhythm of the bays of the elevation shifts at the transition between the original library and the art gallery at the rear. At this junction is an entrance leading to the stair hall within, which is expressed externally as a wide bay flanked by narrower bays, separated by pilasters. The doorway has timber double doors with a window to either side, set within a heavily moulded terracotta architrave with fluting, Renaissance arches and an open pediment. Above, lighting the stair, are five Romanesque windows with a segmental pediment containing a cartouche with the gilt inscription ‘ART GALLERY’. On the top floor there are casements with gauged brick lintels, with a pediment above within which is a moulded label inscribed ‘SCHOOL OF ART’, surrounded by scroll mouldings. There is a blue plaque to artist Percy Shakespeare.

The building line steps back to the right to the main floors of the art gallery, where there is an open well to the basement. As with the principal elevations, there are pilasters articulating a series of bays, with the second and fourth being wider, with full dormers on the top floor with Renaissance arched windows and segmental pediments.

Return and rear elevations are plainly detailed and partially enveloped by adjacent buildings.

INTERIOR: the entrance on Priory Street leads into a lobby with timber panelling and arched doorways providing entrance into large rooms running along on either side of the main range: the original library and reading room. Sections of cornices and coving survive behind later partitioning and suspended ceilings. Ground floor windows to the former reading room are etched with geological imagery and a quote from Dali, added in 1992. The first floor, originally the Elementary Room of the art school, has a large open plan room which would have been open to the roof, with moulded arched timber trusses and purlins. The original lantern was pitched with clerestory lights; this has been truncated and blocked. To the northwest there is a series of smaller classrooms, one with a north light, leading off a tiled corridor.

The entrance to the former art gallery and art school from St James’s Road is into a large stair hall. Walls are tiled to shoulder height with cream octagon and red dot tiles, and the floor is covered in terracotta tiles. There is an open-well stair with slender moulded timber newels, twisted iron balusters and a moulded handrail. Windows to the stair hall have leaded and stained glass, featuring heraldic imagery, local references, entwined ‘D’s and floral patterns.

The north-west range of the building contains single open-plan rooms on two storeys, with a mezzanine laterally subdividing the ground floor room. On the ground floor was the original gallery; it has a mahogany doorcase with deep mouldings, and a Minton-style tiled floor with cast iron ventilation grilles. There are fluted column bases, which rise into the mezzanine above, where they terminate with composite capitals, and form part of an ornate ceiling, with deep relief lattice and flower moulded brackets and cornices, and a panelled ceiling with moulded ribs. Windows are timber casements, and have been boarded over externally. The first floor, originally the Antique Room and latterly the Brook Robinson Museum, is open to the pitched roof, and has two deep moulded timber trusses with ties rods, moulded purlins, and a coved cornice. It is lit by two lofty dormer windows.

The basement consists of a series of plain service rooms, with brick vaulted ceilings. There are understood to be cellars and a bread oven from an earlier structure surviving beneath the south-east end of the building.

SUBSIDIARY FEATURES: there is a low wall with wrought iron railings in front of the basement to the north-west gallery range.

History

The building now known as Dudley Museum and Gallery was originally a free library, art gallery and art school. Construction began in 1883 and it was opened the following year. The architects were Bateman and Corser of Birmingham, with local builders Webb and Round constructing the building at a cost of £6,700.

The needs for a free public library and a new art school in Dudley emerged at a similar time, and led to the decision to collocate them within a single building, with Blocksidge’s Illustrated Dudley Almanack noting the appropriate combination of these two ‘distinct and yet kindred institutions'. The building was opened in a well-attended ceremony on 29 July 1884.

The free library was equipped with a stock of around 5000 books, and had a large and well-lit reading room. It remained in use for a relatively short period; its popularity led to overcrowding, and following a grant from Andrew Carnegie, a new library was opened, on the opposite side of St James’s Road, in 1909 (Grade II). The old free library then went into use as a geological museum, in 1912.

The art school, too, was immediately popular, having replaced an existing, inadequate facility at St Thomas’s School. A newspaper account describes the large, top-lit elementary room, and rooms for antiques, painting, modelling and masters, all arranged in conformity with the regulations of the South Kensington Art Department. Committee rooms, caretakers’ rooms, store rooms and lavatories were also provided. The building was used as an art school until 1966. Alumni include Percy Shakespeare (1906-1942), to whom there is a blue plaque on the building, and James Whale (1889-1957).The art gallery was slower to become established, having started with no collection or budget. An inaugural exhibition launched the gallery in 1888, and a fund to establish a collection was established.

On the eastern corner of the building a set of meteorological instruments were added in 1927. These were donated by James Smellie to commemorate his wife, the Mayoress of Dudley, 1925-1926. The instruments consist of an aneroid barometer, a dial thermometer and a dial wind-speed indicator, all of which were specially made, and ‘of the most modern and accurate type’.

After the art school left the building it was used solely as a museum and gallery. Various internal alterations have been made to meet changing requirements, the most notable being the insertion of a mezzanine in the former ground floor gallery. The museum’s important geological collection inspired an artwork, which was added to the former reading room windows in 1992. Etched geological images chart the history of evolution via various fossil references including Dudley’s famous Crinoid, along with a quotation from Salvador Dali: “the rocks of the imagination still remain.” The artist was Steve Field and each window was sandblasted by a student at Dudley College’s School of Glass. The lantern above the elementary room (south-east range) has been lost, along with the cupola to the corner turret.

Reasons for Listing

Dudley Museum and Art Gallery, 1883-1884 by Bateman and Corser of Birmingham, is listed at Grade II, for the following principal reasons:

Architectural interest:

* a skilfully-designed building providing accommodation for three distinct but related functions, with well-composed elevations with good quality dressings, optimising its corner plot with a striking turret;
* the internal plan form survives well, along with various good-quality fixtures, structural features and decorative details which reflect the function and hierarchy of spaces;
* the main art gallery is a sumptuously appointed room, which, despite the insertion of the mezzanine floor, continues to reflect trends of the period in gallery design;
* the building contains a good collection of painted and leaded glass, and has a geologically-themed set of etched glass windows to the former reading room;
* having local distinction in its architectural relationship with other civic buildings; use of local symbols and references; and for its authorship by a firm of Birmingham architects.

Historic interest:

* for the association with the Dudley Art Circle and with Percy Shakespeare, who is commemorated with a Blue Plaque on the building.

External Links

Historic England Listing

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