New Gallery (Regent Street, London)

RA Collection: People and Organisations

The New Gallery was an art gallery at 121 Regent Street, London founded by J. Comyns Carr and Charles Edward Halle in 1888. Carr and Halle had previously been directors of the Grosvenor Gallery but after a disagreement with its owner, Sir Coutts Lindsay, they left to set up the New Gallery, taking with them many of the former galleries artists such as Burne-Jones, George Frederic Watts and Lord Leighton

The building was designed by Edward Robert Robson and constructed in little more than three months to ensure that it could open in the summer of 1888.

In October and November 1888, the New Gallery hosted the first exhibition of industrial and applied arts by the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society under the direction of its founding president, Walter Crane. No attempt had been made to show contemporary decorative arts in London since the Grosvenor Gallery's Winter Exhibition of 1881. The Society's annual (later triennial) exhibitions at the New Gallery were important events in the Arts and Crafts Movement at the end of the 19th century.

The New Gallery held a major Burne-Jones retrospective in 1892–93 and a memorial exhibition of his works in 1898. The last exhibition held there was the Arts and Crafts Exhibition of 1910. After the gallery closed in 1910 it was converted into The New Gallery Restaurant and then in 1913 it was converted into a Cinema. From 1953 to the 1990s it was leased to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In 2006 it became a Habitat furniture store and from 2012 a flagship store for Burberry.