Scarborough Art Gallery: The Yorkshire coast art museum where a LGBTQIA+ pride exhibition is taking place
The Scarborough Art Gallery was built as a family home in the 1840s and is housed in a Grade II Italianate villa - here’s its history.
The art gallery in Scarborough was initially designed by Richard Hey Sharp and is administered by the Scarborough Museums Trust.
Over the last 70 years, its permanent collection has been developed through gifts, legacies and purchases.
The permanent collection involves paintings donated by the famous hotelier Tom Laughton. Artists such as John Atkinson Grimshaw, John Jackson, Matthew Smith and Frank Brangwyn’s works are included in the collection.
The gallery is hosting a Picturing Pride event that started on February 1 and will end on April 26, 2025.
The exhibition marks LGBTQIA+ History Month in February and visitors will get to see new photographs taken by Aidan Brooks, captured at Scarborough Pride in 2024.
History of Scarborough Art Gallery
The gallery was initially named Crescent House which was built as a family home in the late 1840s by a local solicitor John Uppleby.
After John’s death in 1856, his wife and family continued to live in the house until her death 25 years later, by then it was bought by Edward Chivers Bower, who was the father of sculptor Lady Ethel Alice Chivers Harris and the great grandfather of Katherine, Duchess of Kent.
Mr Bower renamed the house ‘Broxholme’ after his family seat near Doncaster and the house stayed in the Bower family until 1904. It was then sold to Miss Mary Evelyn Maud Crompton Standsfield, whose family claimed ancestral connections to the diarist John Evelyn.
The house was used as a summer accommodation and Miss Stansfield let it out for the rest of the year. In 1924, the house was sold to its last private owner, Henry Edward Donner, a solicitor and a member of one of Scarborough’s oldest families, who renamed it ‘Crescent House’.
He was an avid gardener and made many enhancements to the gardens including installing the stone gateway to the old Falsgrave Strawberry Gardens, which are still around today.
After the death of Henry Donner, the house was bought by Scarborough Corporation in 1942 for £3,000 and for five years it was used as a welfare clinic and children’s nursery.
It was transformed into a public art gallery in February 1947 and the clinic moved out. The Scarborough Art Gallery opened to the public in November of that year.