Book excerpt: There are over thirty public art galleries in north-west England with substantial permanent collections. The superb collections in Liverpool at the Walker Art Gallery and in Manchester at the City Art Gallery and at the Whitworth Art Gallery are well known, while Lord Leverhulme’s splendid British paintings and sculptures preserved at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight have an international reputation. For Pre-Raphaelite, Classical, Aesthetic and Impressionist British art and much else, north-west England cumulatively has public collections unmatched even in London. This book is both a guide and a history to these collections as well as other less famous public collections containing little-known masterpieces.