Christ Church Picture Gallery is an art museum at Christ Church

Christ Church, Oxford

Christ Church or house of Christ, and thus sometimes known as The House), is one of the largest constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England...

, one of the colleges of Oxford University in England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

. The gallery holds an important collection of about 300 Old Master paintings and nearly 2,000 drawings. It is one of the most important private collections in the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

. The greater part of the collection was bequeathed in 1765 by a former member of the college, General John Guise. Further gifts and bequests were made by W.T.H. Fox-Strangways

William Fox-Strangways, 4th Earl of Ilchester

William Thomas Horner Fox-Strangways, 4th Earl of Ilchester FRS , styled The Honourable William Fox-Strangways until 1858, was a British diplomat and Whig politician...

, Walter Savage Landor

Walter Savage Landor

Walter Savage Landor was an English writer and poet. His best known works were the prose Imaginary Conversations, and the poem Rose Aylmer, but the critical acclaim he received from contemporary poets and reviewers was not matched by public popularity...

, Sir Richard Nosworthy & C.R. Patterson (Russian Orthodox metal plaques, many enamelled).

The Picture Gallery is especially strong on Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 art from the 14th to 18th centuries. The collection includes paintings by Annibale Carracci

Annibale Carracci

Annibale Carracci was an Italian Baroque painter.-Early career:Annibale Carracci was born in Bologna, and in all likelihood first apprenticed within his family...

 (The Butcher's Shop), Duccio

Duccio

Duccio di Buoninsegna was one of the most influential Italian artists of his time. Born in Siena, Tuscany, he worked mostly with pigment and egg tempera and like most of his contemporaries painted religious subjects...

, Fra Angelico

Fra Angelico

Fra Angelico , born Guido di Pietro, was an Early Italian Renaissance painter described by Vasari in his Lives of the Artists as having "a rare and perfect talent"...

, Hugo van der Goes

Hugo van der Goes

Hugo van der Goes was a Flemish painter. He was, along with Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling and Gerard David, one of the most important of the Early Netherlandish painters.-Biography:...

, Giovanni di Paolo

Giovanni di Paolo

Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia was an Italian painter, working primarily in Siena. He may have apprenticed with Taddeo di Bartolo, becoming a prolific painter and illustrator of manuscripts, including Dante's texts....

, Filippino Lippi

Filippino Lippi

Filippino Lippi was an Italian painter working during the High Renaissance in Florence, Italy.-Biography:...

 (The Wounded Centaur), Sano di Pietro

Sano di Pietro

Sano di Pietro was an early Italian Renaissance painter and miniaturist from Siena.No works by Sano are known before 1443; he apprenticed under Sassetta and Giovanni di Paolo...

, Frans Hals

Frans Hals

Frans Hals was a Dutch Golden Age painter. He is notable for his loose painterly brushwork, and helped introduce this lively style of painting into Dutch art. Hals was also instrumental in the evolution of 17th century group portraiture.-Biography:Hals was born in 1580 or 1581, in Antwerp...

, Salvator Rosa

Salvator Rosa

Salvator Rosa was an Italian Baroque painter, poet and printmaker, active in Naples, Rome and Florence. As a painter, he is best known as an "unorthodox and extravagant" and a "perpetual rebel" proto-Romantic.-Early life:...

, Tintoretto

Tintoretto

Tintoretto , real name Jacopo Comin, was a Venetian painter and a notable exponent of the Renaissance school. For his phenomenal energy in painting he was termed Il Furioso...

, Anthony Van Dyck

Anthony van Dyck

Sir Anthony van Dyck was a Flemish Baroque artist who became the leading court painter in England. He is most famous for his portraits of Charles I of England and his family and court, painted with a relaxed elegance that was to be the dominant influence on English portrait-painting for the next...

 and Paolo Veronese

Paolo Veronese

Paolo Veronese was an Italian painter of the Renaissance in Venice, famous for paintings such as The Wedding at Cana and The Feast in the House of Levi...

, and drawings by Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...

, Raphael

Raphael

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...

, Michelangelo

Michelangelo

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art...

, Albrecht Dürer

Albrecht Dürer

Albrecht Dürer was a German painter, printmaker, engraver, mathematician, and theorist from Nuremberg. His prints established his reputation across Europe when he was still in his twenties, and he has been conventionally regarded as the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance ever since...

 and Peter Paul Rubens and a great range of other artists, especially Italians.

The drawings collection is shown by a small exhibition, changing roughly every three months, and sometimes showing works not in the permanent collection, especially those by modern artists. The gallery was designed by Hidalgo Moya

Hidalgo Moya

John Hidalgo Moya , sometimes known as Jacko Moya, was a famous American-born architect who worked largely in England. Moya was a native of California where he was born to an English mother and Mexican father but lived in England since he was an infant. He formed the architectural practice Powell &...

 and Philip Powell

Philip Powell (architect)

Sir Arnold Joseph Philip Powell , usually known as Philip Powell, was a ground-breaking English post-war architect.He was educated at Epsom College and then the Architectural Association....

, and built in 1968, enabling the collection to be open to the public for the first time. It is located in the Deanery garden.

External links

• Christ Church Gallery website