The Art Lover

A trip to the Bowes Museum to see the wonderful collection of art - it is located on the outskirts of Barnard Castle (of Dominic Cummings Fame) and well worth a visit.  The Extra Photos  provide a flavour of the art on exhibit and a shot of the exterior of the building.
Background on the Bowes Museum: 
The Bowes Museum was purpose-built as a public art gallery for John Bowes and his wife Joséphine Chevalier, Countess of Montalbo, who both died before it opened in 1892. Bowes was the illegitimate son of John Bowes, the 10th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne.
It was designed with the collaboration of two architects, the French architect Jules Pellechet (fr) and John Edward Watson of Newcastle. The building, in a grand French style within landscaped gardens, an early account described it as "... some 500 feet in length by 50 feet high, and is designed in the French style of the First Empire. Its contents are priceless, consisting of unique Napoleon relics, splendid picture galleries, a collection of old china, not to be matched anywhere else in the world, jewels of incredible beauty and value; and, indeed, a wonderful and rare collection of art objects of every kind."
Among those with less favourable opinions was Nikolaus Pevsner, who considered it to be "... big, bold and incongruous, looking exactly like the town hall of a major provincial town in France. In scale it is just as gloriously inappropriate for the town to which it belongs (and to which it gives some international fame) as in style".
The building was begun in 1869 and was reputed to have cost £100,000 (£10,080,000 as of 2012).  Bowes and his wife left an endowment of £125,000 and a total of 800 paintings. Their collection of European fine and decorative arts amounted to 15,000 pieces.

A major redevelopment of the Bowes Museum began in 2005. To date, improvements have been made to visitor facilities (shop, cafe and toilets); galleries (new Fashion & Textile gallery, Silver gallery and English Interiors gallery); and study/learning facilities. The three art galleries, on the second floor of the museum, were also updated.
The museum hosts an internationally significant programme of exhibitions, recently featuring works by Monet, Raphael, Turner, Sisley, Gallé, William Morris, and Toulouse-Lautrec.[Wikipedia]