Hi everyone, I'm Charlotte and this is Orleans House Gallery in Twickenham. We're a free, Grade 1 listed contemporary art gallery on the banks of the River Thames in Twickenham and I'm gonna show you around.
This is our main gallery, and at the moment we have our 'Remember the Future' exhibition on, which is part of our 3 year programme about how we can re-establish and reimagine our relationship with nature and that exhibiotion and our wider programme is designed to help promote our relationship with nature and to support the Boroughs initiative around climate change. This is one of our two exhibition spaces, and in our main gallery we show established artists, emerging artists, and artworks from our Richmond Borough art collection. Let me take you upstairs to the mezzanine, I'll show you around and take you up to our study gallery.
Upstairs is the rest of our 'Remember the Future' exhibition, with works by artists like Bryony Benge Abbott, and this leads us all the way through to our study gallery where we house the Richmond Borough Art Collection. When Nellie Ionides bequeathed the gallery buildings to the borough in the 1960s, she also bequeathed the founding of the Richmond Borough art collection - today we still hold that collection and it comprises over 4,000 works on paper and on other objects.
Not only can you now find all of our works online on our Orleans House Gallery website, but you can come to the study gallery in Orleans House Gallery and find out more about what we hold in the collection. This painting is one of the most famous paintings in our collection, it's a Tillermansand it shows the view of Twickenham riverside as it would've been when the painting was painted, featuring Orleans House Gallery, and this painting is part of our Orleans house and the wider landscape collection that you can find on site just outside our study gallery.
There's a lot you can see in the study gallery at Orleans House Gallery, you can either come here and browse our collection of books about the contemporary area and the history of the borough, or you can come and look through some of the exciting things in our drawers. One of the things you can find in the collection in Orleans House Gallery are objects and artifacts of the Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton and this one is particularly fascinating - known as a housewife, it was a sewing kit given to him by his sister-in-law Elizabeth and contains some of the the things that she thought that he might need on his travels and as you can see, it didn't have much use so we aren't quite sure how much he used that one.
Artworks in our racking in the study gallery either show art from the collection that relate to the gallery overtime, or if you're more interested in people and places of the Borough you can come and see some artworks related to contemporary figures. So this painting tells the story of Queen Caroline, who came here to dine in the 1700s. So the Octagon room itself was built to entertain the Hanoverian Monarchy, and Queen Caroline and her entourage came here with their gold plates, their chefs, and their very particular menu in the 1700s. This is her, and this is her son which lots of people often question when they see the wonderful dress that he is dressed in, and this painting used to hang in our octagon room before our transform Orleans House project in 2018 when we removed the painting and found a wonderful window hidden underneath - so now that sits out here above our original flooring that we discovered during the project, that we opened up and exposed with some glass work so you can now see the original foundations of the building.
So that's everything you can see if you come and visit us but, how did this all begin? So, Orleans House Gallery is going to be 50 next year - it's our anniversary in 2022, but before that it was owned by a wonderful lady named Nellie Ionides. So Nellie was a collector and a philanthropist and when the rest of the building was knocked down in the 1920s, Nellie bought it and bequeathed it to the Borough in the 1960s when she died and that is how we have this amazing building today. This is Nellie and one of her poodles, Clicquot, all of whom were named after brands of champagne, so an amazing woman and definitely worth coming to hear her story.
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