Beecroft Art Gallery

About

Beecroft Art Gallery is an art gallery in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, England. The gallery is housed in the former municipal central library that opened in 1974 in the brutalist style as part of Southend Civic Centre. The Beecroft Art Gallery has a busy programme of changing exhibitions of art, photography and fashion. On the ground floor, the gallery presents temporary exhibitions of modern and contemporary artists, focusing on the work of emerging and established local artists. On the first floor, visitors can see works from the permanent collection and exciting fashion exhibitions. In the basement of the building is the independent charity The Jazz Centre UK.

Prior to 2014, the gallery was located in an Edwardian building on Station Road at Westcliff-on-Sea, opposite the Cliffs Pavilion, and which was donated to the people of Southend-on-Sea in 1952 by Walter Beecroft (1885–1961) to house his eclectic collection of art works. Beecroft was a solicitor in nearby Leigh. He had already set up an Art Gallery Sub-Committee of the Public Libraries & Museum Committee in 1928, and in 1947 he proposed to endow a building to become an Art Gallery. Eventually, this led to the Beecroft Art Gallery on Station Road. Beecroft also endowed the Beecroft Bequest, an art purchase fund administered by the Museums Association. The gallery was resited in 2014 to the former home of the Central Library on Victoria Avenue, Southend-on-Sea, when the library moved to The Forum Southend-on-Sea. The move was completed as a temporary measure, as the original building was subsiding, and the council wanted the former library building to stay open. The plan was ultimately to move the gallery to a new museum located on the Cliffs. The Cliffs museum plan was finally dropped in 2018.

The building was designed as a library by the council's architect, Patrick R. Burrough, as part of the new Southend Civic Centre complex. The Civic Complex would encompass a new police station, the courthouse, council offices and chamber, a new College and a Library on a site first purchased by the council in 1919 for a further education college, but had been reallocated as a town hall site in 1934. The planned fire station for the site was dropped and it built in Sutton Road. The Central Library opened in 1974, moving from the former free library located next door which had been opened in 1905.

The most famous feature of the gallery's building is a tiled wall created by Transform, an architectural ceramics company founded by German artist, sculptor and designer Fritz Steller. Transform were commissioned by the council architect's department to create a sculptural wall around 1973, prior to the building opening as Southend Central Library. Transform created a series of architectural ceramic tiles with an abstract design referencing the stacking of book spines on library shelves. The brown tiles were cast using an innovative casting system utilising extruded tiles, resin and sand, which give them a unique and unrepeatable surface Transform Ceramic is also reported to have created the brick paving and the raised planters around the gallery.

Beecroft Art Gallery has a permanent collection of over 2,000 works, ranging from 17th-century Dutch paintings to contemporary works. The collection includes examples by artists such as Jan Miense Molenaer, Jacob van Ruisdael, Nicolaes Pieterszoon Berchem, Francesco Bissolo, plus 19th-century artists including Rossetti, Constable and Edward Lear. There are works by Carel Weight, the Great Bardfield Group, and a bronze by Jacob Epstein. The local artist Alan Sorrell is represented by his Drawings of Nubia series depicting a visit to Egypt prior to the building of the Aswan Dam. The Thorpe Smith Collection of local landscape views contains paintings, drawings and prints from as early as 1803.

Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Photography via Wikimedia Commons.