Falmouth Art Gallery

Family-friendly and free, the Falmouth Art Gallery stages a vibrant and ambitious exhibition programme, regularly changing displays from its outstanding art collection and an innovative community engagement programme.

The gallery cares for an eclectic collection of over 2000 artworks, from 17th-century paintings to contemporary works. It also holds a collection of automata, an extensive print collection, an illustration archive, and is home to the RCPS Henry Scott Tuke Collection. The gallery resides in the Historical Municipal Buildings built by the Victorian philanthropist John Passmore Edwards in 1894.

Falmouth has been called the ‘home’ of automata making due to the legacy of a special shop called Cabaret that could be found in the town in the early 1980s. There continues to be an important nucleus of contemporary automata makers based around Falmouth.

Automata are moving figures, tableaux or sculptures powered by electricity, clockwork, water, wind, gravity or hand turned.

Over the last 30 years Falmouth Art Gallery has developed a significant contemporary automata collection which includes all of the established local automata makers, and the collection is in constant demand from visitors and school groups and has been loaned for national exhibitions.