Glasgow has one of the finest and largest civic collections of paintings and objects in Europe. Many works of art have been bequeathed or gifted to the city over the last 150 years and gaps in the collections are often filled by purchases.

Glasgow Museums has established a group of volunteers to explore the lives of the people who gifted or bequeathed their paintings to the city. The group has around ten members from varied backgrounds, each with an interest in family history, keen to be an amateur sleuth and with the patience of a saint! The stories of the donors’ lives are added to an electronic archive at Glasgow Museums and hopefully will be become accessible online in the future.

Some donors are well known and well documented, William Burrell and Archibald McLellan being prominent examples. However, the majority of donors come from more modest stock; often they are the merchants and industrialists who contributed to the success of the ‘second city of the British empire’, but also ordinary folk, men and women, old and young. It is the social history of the period which we are investigating, building a collection of individual stories of people, usually with a connection to Glasgow, where they come from and why they left their painting or paintings to Glasgow.

We have so far completed around 180 individual stories. We start with limited information: name, date of donation, and details of the painting/s and, if we are lucky, an address. We then don our investigators’ hats and off we go… Scotlandspeople.gov.uk is a good starting point (although sifting through a long list of John Browns can be frustrating!). Just googling can bring up some promising leads, and there is a growing wealth of information from family history websites to national archives and everything in between.

The Mitchell library in Glasgow is a wonderful source of material for all aspects of Glasgow history, especially Post Office directories, newspapers, archives for business records etc. Glasgow City Council minutes records are available for inspection, noting the council meeting details after a donation is offered. Occasionally a lead is found: an address or a relevant date to work on. Interestingly, art galleries were the responsibility of the Parks Department in the 19th century. As we uncover snippets of information, our explorations can take us to libraries across the country (usually extremely helpful), historic houses , and even scrambling around the odd graveyard. Visits to Glasgow Art Club, Glasgow School of Art and Trades House have uncovered some interesting aspects of our donors’ backgrounds when they may have been members or have had an interesting connection to the organisation. Lists of members and archives of these establishments can be invaluable.

Glasgow University Library and Archives is an important source of information so a university library card is very useful for our group of ‘mature’ students. Information is shared within our group and new sources of information often come to light. Archives of professional bodies are now more readily accessible eg those of RIAS (architects).

An important aspect of our research is ensuring that all information is accurate. Compiling the life history of Joe Bloggs can be fascinating, as long as it is the correct Joe Bloggs. Errors have been picked up in records of birth, marriage and death, one example having three errors in a death certificate (the age of the deceased and both mother’s and father’s names being inaccurate). Viewing a will can often provide some confirmatory information, perhaps the bequest of a painting or the names of spouse and family.

Sometimes our investigations lead nowhere. An individual may have left the area or gone abroad and, although this can lead to fascinating stories of foreign travel, it may be the end of the story.

Women donors merit a mention: 19th century records tend to focus on the traditional male roles of the day, social status and ownership of property being very much a male thing, resulting in fewer records of the backgrounds of female donors, particularly those who were unmarried. If the lady had a spouse, the husband’s story may well be investigated too.

As we build our collection of donor stories it becomes clear that we have a cross section of, mainly, middle-class donors, so we have stories of medical men, local politicians, ministers, artists, industrialists and others, mostly based in or around Glasgow but occasionally from further afield.

As we progress with our research we collate information on the donors’ residences. Within Glasgow we find that there are particular areas where many of them lived, especially in Pollokshields and the West End and Park district, where many of the successful middle classes lived. A photograph of the dwelling house is often added to the archive. It is likely that some of these near neighbours would have known each other, perhaps sharing an interest in art.

But why did these people leave their collections, or just a single painting to Glasgow? In many cases we just don’t know. There are many reasons to leave works of art to a public collection. Several of our donors left works to Kelvingrove Art Galleries to coincide with its opening in 1901.

Some family portraits of successful businessmen or politicians were left to the city which provided their livelihoods. Paintings of local interest eg the river Clyde find their way to the collections because it is just the most appropriate place for it to hang. Bequests are sometimes made in order to continue the memory of the owner. Or maybe sometimes the owner just didn’t want it any more.

Although the information we have gathered is not yet widely available it is hoped that one day it may be accessed online. In the meantime the donor research group provides occasional public talks at Glasgow Museums Resource Centre with the relevant paintings on view. This provides an opportunity to view a painting which otherwise would lie unseen in store and bring to life the story of the donor.

On these pages are a few examples of the stories of donors of paintings to Glasgow museums. They provide a fascinating insight into the social history of Glasgow and its people.