Aberdeen Maritime Museum

Inspiring Art and Music is a redevelopment project which will transform Aberdeen Art Gallery, Cowdray Hall and War Memorial through significant investment in the fabric of the buildings, new exhibition and display galleries and improved facilities for visitors.

The origins of Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums can be traced to 1873 when John Forbes White and a number of local art collectors decided to hold a public exhibition to display their collections. From this developed a plan to establish a public art gallery for the benefit of citizens, an objective that continues to drive the programmes of activity within the Museums and Galleries service today.

Aberdeen's handsome granite Art Gallery, designed by A Marshall Mackenzie, one of the loveliest Victorian galleries in the UK, was opened in 1885. The displays combined industrial exhibitions with exhibitions of art, greatly enhanced by generous gifts, including Aberdeen granite merchant Alexander Macdonald's private collection in 1900. Twenty years later the building was extended to accommodate the establishment of a plaster cast collection from which art students at the newly established Gray's School of Art, at that time adjacent to the Art Gallery, could practice drawing.