Repository: UIHistories Project: Course Catalog - 1884-1885 [PAGE 27]

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Art Gallery.

ART GALLERY.

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The University Art Gallery is one of the largest and finest in the West. It was the gift of citizens of Champaign and Urbana. It occupies a beautiful hall, 61x79 feet, and the large display of Art objects has surprised and delighted all visitors. In sculpture, it embraces thirteen full-size casts of •celebrated statues, including the Laocoon group, the Venus of Milo, etc., forty statues of reduced size, and a large number of busts, ancient and modern, bas reliefs, etc., making over 400 pieces. It includes also hundreds of large autotypes, photographs, and fine engravings, representing many of the great master-pieces of painting of nearly all the modern schools. Also a gallery of historical portraits, mostly large French lithographs of pecular fineness, copied from the great national portrait galleries of France. The value of this splendid collection, as a means of education, is already showing itself in the work of the School of Drawing and Design of the University. Museum of Engineering and Architecture.—A large room is devoted to the gathering of a museum of practical art, the materials for which have been constantly accumulating in the various schools of science. It will contain full lines of illustrations of the work ol the shops; models made at the University and purchased abroad; drawings in all departments; patent-office models, etc.; samples of building materials, natural and artificial; with whatever may be secured that will teach or illustrate in this most important phase of University work. A notable feature of this collection is the gift of Henry Lord Gay, Architect, of Chicago. It consists of a model in plaster, and a complete set ot drawings, of a competitive design for a monument to be erected in Rome, commemorative of Victor Emanuel, first King of Italy. The monument was to be of white marble, an elaborate gothic structure, beautifully ornamented, and 300 feet high. Its estimated cost was to have been seven and a quarter millions of francs. The design was placed by the art committee second on a list of 289 •competitors; but both the first and second were set aside for (political reasons. Mr. Gay's generous gift occupies the place of honor in the Museum of" Engineering and Architecture.