Gloucester City Council’s art collection has been accumulated over many centuries. Before there was a museum in Gloucester, the Borough Council and its predecessors were collecting art to display in their civic buildings. Significant paintings in the collection include a large eighteenth-century portrait of Oliver Cromwell by an unknown artist; 'View of Gloucester from the North West' by Johannes Vorsterman, thought to have been commissioned by a member of the Selwyn family of Matson House, which served as the Royalist headquarters during the Siege of Gloucester in 1643; a small painting by Thomas Gainsborough entitled 'Landscape'; William Turner of Oxford’s 'Newnham-on-Severn, Gloucestershire from Dean Hill'; and paintings of Victorian Gloucester ably depicted by Edward Smith and John Atkinson Grimshaw. Other notable artists represented are Philip Wilson Steer, Walter Richard Sickert, Thérèse Lessore and Laura Sylvia Gosse.