2-721-226 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

'The Ceramic Gallery, South Kensington Museum', c1876, (1881). Interior view of the Ceramics Gallery, a tiled and painted room housing the Museum's collection of pottery and porcelain. The gallery, which opened in 1868, was designed in the fashionable revived Italian Renaissance manner. Its floor was covered in Minton tiles, with ten columns covered in shining majolica (painted tin-glazed earthenware). In the foreground is a ceramic solid fuel stove. The ceiling and friezes were painted over after the Second World War, but much of the gallery was restored during the 1990s. From "The South Kensington Museum", a book of engraved illustrations, with descriptions, of the works of art in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (formerly known as the South Kensington Museum). [Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, London, 1881]