Dulwich Picture Gallery

Until then, the gallery was part of the College of God's Gift, a charitable foundation established by the actor, entrepreneur and philanthropist Edward Alleyn in the early 17th century.The acquisition of artworks by its founders and bequests from its many patrons resulted in Dulwich Picture Gallery housing one of the country's finest collections of Old Masters, especially rich in French, Italian and Spanish Baroque paintings, and in British portraits from the Tudor era to the 19th century.The art historian and Whig politician Horace Walpole wrote that he saw "a hundred mouldy portraits among apostles sibyls and kings of England".The Dulwich collection was improved in size and quality by Sir Francis Bourgeois (1753–1811), originally from Switzerland, and his business partner, Frenchman Noël Desenfans (1744–1807).Touring around Europe buying fine art, Bourgeois and Desenfans took five years to assemble the collection, but by 1795 the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had been partitioned and no longer existed.Bourgeois bequeathed his collection to the College of God's Gift on the advice of the actor John Philip Kemble, a friend of both dealers.[5] Last stolen in 1983, it was recovered from a left-luggage office in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1986; returned anonymously; found on the back of a bicycle; and discovered under a bench in a graveyard in Streatham, south London.[5] In November 2019, During the Rembrandt's Light exhibition featuring loans works from the Louvre in Paris and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, thieves attempted to steal two of the paintings.Instead of constructing a facade with the stucco porticos favoured by many contemporary architects, he opted to use uninterrupted raw brick, a feature subsequently adopted by many 20th-century art galleries.[citation needed] Before Soane settled on his final design, he proposed a number of other ideas around a quadrangle belonging to the Alleyn's charitable foundation to the south of the college buildings.Alms houses constructed by Soane along the west side of the gallery were converted into exhibition space by Charles Barry Jr. in 1880 and an eastward extension was built to designs by E. S. Hall between 1908 and 1938.[15] In 2023, the gallery announced plans for a £4.9 million redevelopment designed by the architects Carmody Groarke, encompassing a new sculpture garden in the southern portion of the site and a new building for school and family activities.