History of Kelvingrove
- Glasgow’s fine art collections had been housed in the McLellan Galleries in Sauchiehall Street since Archibald McLellan’s death in 1854. Industrial Collections were displayed from 1870 in the Kelvingrove Mansion which was built for Provost Patrick Colquhoun c1783, perhaps to designs by Robert Adam. It was situated where the skating rink now lies in the park. Despite the building of a new wing in 1876 for other items such as history and natural history, both the Kelvingrove Museum, as it became known, and the Corporation Galleries of Art were considered overcrowded and out of date.
- A large international exhibition was held in Kelvingrove Park in 1888 to raise funds for a new Art Gallery and Museum. The profit of £41,700 was increased by extra subscriptions to well over £100,000, enabling the Association for the Promotion of Art and Music to go ahead with their ambitious plan for the new building. Kelvingrove was designed by architects John W Simpson and E J Milner Allen, winners of the open competition declared in 1892.
- The Glasgow International Exhibition of 1901 was held to celebrate and inaugurate the new Art Gallery and Museum building. It opened on 2 May and closed on 9 November, was visited by over 11 million people, and yielded a profit of £39,000. It was reopened as a museum in October 1902.
- Since its opening in 1902, the Kelvingrove Collection has been recognised as internationally significant, holding high quality collections across the entire array of museum disciplines - European and Scottish Art arms and armour, natural history, Scottish and Mediterranean archaeology, world cultures and of course the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style artists. The collection and building was valued at £565million when refurbishment work began three years ago.