With the largest collection of oil paintings, prints, watercolours, abstracts, engravings and sculptures, our Spiller department is one of the finest collections of art outside of a gallery (in our humble opinion!), and better yet, everything’s available to hire. Storing the collection and then finding particular pieces is a challenge but we think we’ve cracked it. 

Not only are the paintings exquisite but some of the frames are works of art in themselves so it was heart breaking for us to have had to store them for so many years in substandard ‘boxed’ sections, sometimes tightly packed causing damage to the frames whenever they were pulled out and pushed back in to their section. Not only that but without the help of our team you weren’t able to browse the entire collection at your leisure waiting for inspiration to strike.

But fear not, we’ve finally upgraded to the racking system we’ve wanted for so long and have managed to hang over 500 of our beautiful portraits on archive style rolling racks allowing you to see each painting, hung up, without the risk of any damage. All of the paintings are hung in chronological order and by genre, so if you’re on the hunt for paintings of college dons or military men then you can easily follow the signs straight to them. We’re in the process of improving the lighting in this section as well so they’ll all be clearly visible and displayed as they should be.

The installation starts to take shape

Moving a vast amount of the collection on to these rolling racks has also allowed us to re-organise and spread out the other sections so they’re no longer so tightly packed and are more clearly arranged by genre. The modern art has also undergone a transformation and our prints have a new room all to themselves

Just one of the many categories being sorted ready for the new Print Room

All beautifully organised in their new home

The move took us around a month to complete from installation to moving the last painting. There are still little tweaks going on here and there but it’s now easier than ever to find the exact paintings you’re after.

With over 5000 pieces in the entire Spiller collection it took some doing but now that they’re so well organised I challenge you not to find exactly what your set needs.

The finished article. Our new archives racks showing off our vast portrait collection