Plymouth City Museum & Art Gallery

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Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery in the Drake Circus area of Plymouth, Devon, England is the largest museum and art gallery in the city. It was built in 1907–10 by Thornely and Rooke in Edwardian Baroque style. The Museum and Art Gallery is currently closed for major redevelopment and is set to re-open as part of the Plymouth History Centre (working title) in spring 2020.CollectionsThe Museum has collections of fine and decorative arts, natural history and human history. The natural history collection consists of over 150,000 specimens and an historic natural history library and archive. Many prehistoric artefacts from Dartmoor, important Bronze Age and Iron Age material from Mount Batten and medieval and post-medieval finds from Plymouth are found in the human history collection alongside artifacts from ancient Egypt and other ancient cultures of Europe and the Middle East.The art collections include 750 easel paintings, over 3,000 watercolours and drawings, at least 5,000 prints and a sizeable collection of sculptures. A large proportion of the art was donated to the people of Plymouth in 1852 by William Cotton (1794–1863) and is known as the Cottonian Collection. It had been put together principally by the collector Charles Rogers (1711–1784), and includes works by Sir Joshua Reynolds who was born locally.