On 1 Aug 1867, the Birmingham City Art Gallery opened in one room in the Birmingham and Midland Institute. Annual attendance in the thirty-by-seventy-foot room was 145,761 in 1872, when the gallery first opened on Sundays. By 1877, in the same space, attendance was an astonishing 393,645.

Articles

Amy Woodson-Boulton, “The City Art Museum Movement and the Social Role of Art”