Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery


Established	1893; 131 years ago (1893)
Location	Castle Street, Carlisle CA3 8TP, England, United Kingdom
Coordinates	54°53′43″N 2°56′26″W / 54.8952°N 2.9405°W / 54.8952; -2.9405
Visitors	240,000 (2018) ^[2]
Chairman	Andrew Smith ^[1]
Director	Andrew Mackay ^[1]
Website	www.tulliehouse.co.uk

Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery is a museum in Carlisle, England. Opened by the Carlisle Corporation in 1893, the original building is a converted Jacobean mansion, with extensions added when it was converted. At first the building contained the museum and also a library, an art school and a technical school.^[3]^[4]

Tullie House Museum is currently closed to the public for redevelopment work. It will re-open in the summer of 2024, when it will have a new main entrance on Castle Street to its north-east.^{[citation needed]}

The building, including the extensions, is a Grade I listed building,^[3] and the wall, gates and railings in front of the house are separately Grade I listed.^[5]

The two schools were moved in the 1950s and the library in 1986. The museum expanded into the city Guildhall in 1980 and with new space available from 1986 it underwent an extensive redevelopment over 1989–90 and again in 2000–01.

Since May 2011 the museum has been an independent charitable trust, the Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery Trust.^[6] It is one of the three members of the Cumbria Museum Consortium, along with Lakeland Arts and the Wordsworth Trust.^[7] In 2012–15 and 2015–18 this consortium was one of the 21 museums or consortia (16 in the earlier period) to be funded by Arts Council England as "Major Partner Museums".^[8]

Collections

The museum has large and eclectic collections of zoological, botanical and geological material. The plant collector, Clara Winsome Muirhead worked at the museum in the 1940s and donated a large collection of botanical specimens to the museum. The fine and decorative arts collections include works by Burne-Jones and other Pre-Raphaelite artists, as well as Stanley Spencer, Winifred Nicholson, Sheila Fell and Phil Morsman.

Musical instruments

There is collection of stringed instruments including a violin by Andrea Amati from the royal collection of France.^[9]

Roman Britain

There were two Roman forts in Carlisle, one of which, Uxelodunum (or Stanwix to use the modern toponym), was the largest along the length of Hadrian's Wall. The museum houses important collections and temporary exhibitions associated with Hadrian's Wall.^[10]