Laing Art Gallery

About Laing Art Gallery

The Laing Art Gallery opened in 1904, paid for by Alexander Laing, a Scottish-born Newcastle wine and spirit merchant who gave the city a gallery to mark fifty years in business. Cackett and Burns Dick designed the building in a Baroque manner with Art Nouveau detail, and it is now Grade II listed. The collection that grew inside it has become the most important public art holding in the city, strongest in British painting from the eighteenth century onwards. Among the best-known works are John Martin's apocalyptic The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, William Holman Hunt's Isabella and the Pot of Basil, and Edward Burne-Jones's Laus Veneris, alongside paintings by Joshua Reynolds, J.M.W. Turner and Ben Nicholson.

The gallery also holds notable decorative art with a distinctly regional flavour: Newcastle silver, the enamelled and engraved glasses of William Beilby, and Maling pottery from the once vast Tyneside works. Displays of the permanent collection are complemented by a programme of regularly rotating temporary exhibitions, so there is usually something new even for frequent visitors. The Laing is run by North East Museums, entry to the gallery is free, and there is a café and shop on site. It sits a short walk from Monument Metro and the Northumberland Street shops, next to the City Library on New Bridge Street.

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