Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery

The Hunterian is Scotland's oldest public museum and home to over a million magnificent items ranging from meteorites to mummies and Mackintosh!

About Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery

	University Avenue, Glasgow West End G12 0RG
	01413304221
	Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery Website
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Listed Under Attractions - History and Culture / Attractions - Art Galleries / Attractions - Museums

Within this diverse collection you will find astounding artefacts, amazing art and an astonishing array of animal life.

There are various venues to discover on the University campus - the Hunterian Museum, Hunterian Art Gallery, home to The Mackintosh House, the Zoology Museum and the Anatomy Museum.

Hunterian Museum:
At the heart of the University of Glasgow since 1807, the Hunterian Museum is a stunning space filled with collections that explore the development of knowledge and understanding and the relationship between Glasgow, Scotland and the rest of the world.

You can see a number of highlights in the Hunterian Museum including the Bearsden Shark, Cleopatra Coin and Chinese Map of the World.

The Antonine Wall displays tell the story of Roman settlement in Scotland and the gems, fossils and dinosaurs reveal the very history of the earth.

The history of medicine in the west of Scotland and Lord Kelvin’s scientific instruments feature in the displays about scientific innovation in Glasgow. 

The Curating Discomfort intervention highlights the ways in which our collections and displays are inextricably linked to the history of colonialism and empire and the foregrounding of a Western account of the world.

Hunterian Art Gallery:
Iconic art in an iconic building! The Hunterian Art Gallery frames questions about how art and art galleries can be more meaningful to more people.

See works by Whistler and Mackintosh, Rembrandt and Rubens, the Glasgow Boys and Scottish Colourists, as well as leading contemporary artists.

You can see a number of highlights in the Hunterian Art Gallery including Chardin's 'A Lady Taking Tea', Rembrandt's 'The Entombment' and Gavin Hamilton's 'Hector's Farewell to Andromache'.

The displays in the main gallery feature a significant number of artworks made by women and other artists who have been less well represented.

The Hunterian Art Gallery is also home to one of Scotland's largest print collections, a sculpture courtyard, the Mackintosh House and an exciting programme of contemporary art exhibitions.

The Mackintosh House:
A remarkable Glasgow home! The Mackintosh House is Charles Rennie Mackintosh's only surviving domestic interior in his native Glasgow.

The Mackintosh House is a careful reassemblage of the main rooms from the Glasgow home of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh.

The artists and designers, whose work is now world famous, designed their distinctive home together. It was remarkable then, and now, for the disciplined austerity of the furnishings and decoration.

The Mackintosh House Introduction Gallery tells the fascinating story of the artists, their house and the Mackintosh collection.

More information about the Mackintosh House, including archival photographs, architectural drawings and other documents, can be found on our Mackintosh Architecture: Context, Making and Meaning website.

Hunterian Zoology Museum:
The Hunterian Zoology Museum, located in the Graham Kerr building, showcases the astonishing diversity of the animal kingdom.

The rich diversity of the animal kingdom is represented here in a classic taxonomical order with specimens from elephants to echidnas and from giant squid to glass sponges. There are just under 800 different species on display, which is a tiny fraction of the estimated 7.7 million animal species thought to exist on Earth.

The Zoology Museum has been at the heart of the Graham Kerr Building since it opened in 1923. The displays were designed to aid teaching of undergraduate students and are still used as part of classes today.

The origins of the individual specimens are varied, many were purchased from natural history supply companies, some were collected by staff and students at the University, others were donated by individuals or other museums. Often the identity of the person who collected the animal from the wild is not known and has been lost to history.

Around a fifth of the animals on display here are classified as threatened and with a changing climate and an ongoing biodiversity crisis the situation for most species on Earth is going to get worse. In the future it is likely that many species will only exist as specimens in museums such as this.

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All information (whether in text or photographs) is supplied in good faith but should not be relied upon as being a statement of representation or fact.

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