500 years of British art
Tate Britain’s collection features some 70,000 works reaching from the Tudor era to the present, including venerable examples from Britain’s portrait and landscape traditions and masterpieces by the Pre-Raphaelites. There are nine rooms dedicated to the prolific English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner, the largest such collection in the world. Modern and contemporary artists represented include Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Bridget Riley and Lubaina Himid. Its exhibition programme is world class and an annual commission invites artists to respond to the museum’s neoclassical Duveen Galleries, built in 1937 as the first public sculpture galleries in England. These have included large-scale installations by Mike Nelson, Phyllida Barlow, Anthea Hamilton and Hew Locke. Tate Britain is also known as the home of the annual Turner Prize for contemporary art, which was established in 1984 to assist the museum’s acquisitions programme and honors recent work by artists born or working in Britain. Its first decades were marked by controversy in the press. The prize is now hosted at Tate Britain every other year.
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