NEW GALLERY
The New Gallery at 121 Regent Street, close to Piccadilly Circus opened in 1888. The West and North Galleries on the ground floor displayed larger oil paintings, and the first-floors balcony around the Central Hall displayed smaller works in oils, watercolours, etchings and drawings with sculpture displayed in the Central Hall. The Gallery was the brainchild of Joseph William Comyns Carr, drama critic and playwright and Charles Edward Hallé, himself an artist and the son the founder of the Hallé Orchestra. Comyns Carr and Hallé had been co-directors of the Grosvenor Gallery but had resigned from the troubled gallery the previous year. The New Gallery directors were great champions of the Pre-Raphaelite, and the Aesthetic Movement and encouraged their friends Edward Burne-Jones, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, William Holman Hunt, George Frederic Watts and Lord Leighton to contribute not only to the gala opening but to show regularly at the new venue. Towards the end of its first year in October 1888 the Gallery hosted the first exhibition of industrial and applied arts by the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society under the direction of its founding president, illustrator and designer Walter Crane. It was the first such show in London since the Grosvenor Gallery's Winter Exhibition of 1881. The Gallery was also the venue for a major Burne-Jones retrospective in 1892–93 and a memorial exhibition of his works in 1898. The Gallery’s popularity began to decline towards the end of the first decade of the 20th century and Comyns Carr resigned in 1908 and in 1910 the building became the New Gallery Restaurant. This Gallery should not be conflated with an identically named gallery based in Shandwick Place, Glasgow.