Wolverhampton Art Gallery. Wolverhampton Art Gallery is located in the City of Wolverhampton, in the West Midlands, United Kingdom. The building was funded and constructed by local contractor Philip Horsman, and built on land provided by the Council. It opened in May 1884. The two-storey building of Wolverhampton Art Gallery was designed by prominent Birmingham architect Julius Chatwin. It was built of Bath stone, an Oolitic Limestone from Bath, Somerset, with six red granite columns indicating the main entrance. The decorative sculptural frieze on the facade is composed of sixteen characters representing the Arts and Crafts, including sculpture, painting, architecture, pottery, glassblowing, and wrought-iron work. It is a Grade II* listed building. In 2006-07 the building was refurbished by Purcell, partly modernized and extended to create additional exhibition spaces. The most outstanding artwork of international importance in the collection is the large-scale painting Peace and Plenty Binding the Arrows of War by the Flemish Baroque painter Abraham Janssens van Nuyssen. Commissioned and paid for by the Antwerp Guild of Old Crossbowmen, it was a pendant to the Rubens's Crowning of the Victor. In the 1800s, the city's guilds were broken up and their treasures dispersed. Janssen's picture eventually found its way to a Mrs Thornley of Birmingham. In 1885, she sold it to Wolverhampton Art Gallery. This is the only painting by Janssens in British public collections and a splendid example of Flemish Baroque art. Apart from the Janssens' painting, the collection of Old Masters is relatively small. It includes a version of A Spinner's Grace by Gerard Dou, Bouquet of Flowers by Jan van Huysum. There is a collection of Old Master drawings, which includes graphic work by Wenceslas Hollar and Alessandro Allori. A significant part of the gallery's collection was formed from bequests and gifts given by local benefactors and patrons of art. These include those from the tin-toy manufacturer Sidney Cartwright, Philip Horsman and hardware manufacturer Paul Lutz. They mainly collected contemporary and early 19th-century British art and today the holdings of the Gallery are still particularly strong in artworks from the Victorian period. In the 1920s-1950s, a large number of artworks by Frank Brangwyn were given to the gallery by the artist himself, and by his friend and member of Wolverhampton Art Committee Matthew Biggar Walker. In 1924, a significant collection of Eastern weapons was secured. During the first decades of the 20th century many specimens of Eastern applied art and British and Eastern ceramics and glass were given to the gallery by the members of the prominent local Bantock family and several other collectors. The Gallery has substantial collection of japanned ware and Bilston enamels. These collections represent trades and manufactures for which Wolverhampton was famous in the 18th and 19th centuries. The purposeful collecting policy of the 1970s brought to the Gallery a number of high quality artworks by leading British artists of the 18th-century Georgian period. The gallery has strong holdings of artworks by local artists, such as John Fullwood, Joseph Vickers de Ville, George Phoenix, Alfred Egerton Cooper. In 1990s, following the re-structure of museum services across the area, the art and local history collections of the Bilston Museum and Art Gallery were transferred to Wolverhampton. They brought to the Gallery artworks by Edwin Butler Bayliss, another local painter of the industrial landscape of the Black Country. Since the late 1960s, Wolverhampton Art Gallery has been amassing a substantial collection of pop art. A special feature of the gallery is the collection of artworks which document and analyse the time of Troubles in Northern Ireland. At present, the gallery's collection consists of about 12,000 artefacts: oil paintings and works on paper from 17th-20th centuries; collection of Eastern objects of applied art; japanned ware; enamels; ceramics and glass; dolls and toys; and local history. Dr John Fraser's collection of geological specimens has also been preserved at the gallery. A selection of objects from the collection are on permanent show in several display rooms. Selected paintings by the 18th-century artists from the gallery's collection include the Portrait of the Lee Family by Joseph Highmore, 'David Garrick in The Provoked Wife by Johann Zoffany, 'Portrait of Erasmus Darwin by Joseph Wright of Derby, 'Apotheosis of Penelope Boothby' by Henry Fuseli, Arrival of Louis XVIII at Calais by Wolverhampton-born Edward Bird. In addition, portrait miniatures, Bilston enamels depicting famous actors of the era, and some examples of the 18th-century Eastern and British ceramics are on display.