Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum
The Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum – formerly The Smith Institute – has played a very special part in the history of Stirling since its foundation in 1874. Established by the bequest of artist Thomas Stuart Smith (1815–1869) on land supplied by the Burgh of Stirling, it is an historic public-private partnership which has continued to the present day. It was founded as a gallery of mainly contemporary art, with museum and library reading room ‘for the benefit of the inhabitants of Stirling, Dunblane and Kinbuck’.
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery
Sir John Eardley-Wilmot, 1st Baronet, during his period was Lt. Governor of Tasmania, did much of the work that led to the modern museum. The museum was noted as first being an established institution in the 1848 minutes of the Royal Society of Tasmania, though Wilmot had done most of the work in 1843 and had attempted to set up a museum in the cottage of the Secretary of the Governor, in what is now the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens. In 1838 the Mechanics' Institution received an agreement from the government for a room to be constructed in the Customs House for use as a museum. Customs House was later requisitioned by the Legislative Council of Tasmania and became Parliament House, Hobart. The Royal Society of Tasmania later founded TMAG in the sub-committee room of the Parliament, possibly the same room.
The museum moved to Harrington St in 1852, where it paid £60 a year in rent for a hall there. In 1853 the governor placed before the Legislative Council a debate on the state granting a plot of land for the building of a permanent museum building. In 1854 the museum attracted over 1000 visitors in a year for the first time. In 1855 the Lady Franklin Museum, founded in 1842 at Acanthe Park (now Lenah Valley), sold its fittings and collection to the Royal Society and these were added to the TMAG. The acquisition was driven by the donation of a large geology collection by Joseph Milligan.