Loans and Licensing

Loans

Lending capacity 2025 – 2027

In 2021 we began a significant programme of work to secure the long-term preservation and usefulness of the city’s nationally designated collections through much-needed improvements to collections housing across the Gallery’s three sites of Manchester Art Gallery, Queens Park Conservation studios and Platt Hall. Alongside the programme of building works, we are also undertaking a series of collection reviews to help us better understand our collections and their potential future use and purpose. In order to complete this ambitious programme of work we introduced a moratorium on loans from 2021 – 2024.  We are now accepting requests to borrow work from 2025 onwards but our ability to lend will be dependent on the accessibility of items and the capacity of our collections care and technical teams.

Borrowing an Artwork

Manchester Art Gallery has an active loans programme of short and long term loans to UK and international venues to help increase public access to our collection and enrich our understanding of it. We aim to support as many requests as possible within the resources we have available, balancing the number of loans we can support with our own public programme and essential collections care activity. Our full loans policy, including details of how to request a loan and costs associated with borrowing works from the collection, can be found here. If you would like further information about borrowing works from the collection please contact us.

Immunity from Seizure

When borrowing works of art, Manchester Art Gallery is able to provide immunity from seizure under Part 6 of the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007. This provides immunity from seizure for cultural objects which are loaned from overseas to temporary public exhibitions in approved museums or galleries in the UK where conditions are met when the object enters the UK. 

The conditions are: 

• The object is usually kept outside the UK
• The object is not owned by a person who is resident in UK 
• The import of the object does not contravene any law 
• The object is brought into UK for purpose of a temporary public exhibition at an approved museum or gallery 
• The museum or gallery has published information about the object 

Our Due Diligence Policy can be viewed here.

For further information on immunity from seizure, please refer directly to the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007 or the Department for Culture Media and Sport website.

There are no exhibitions at Manchester Art Gallery with protected objects at present.

Licensing

Many of our images are available to buy as beautiful high quality art prints and framed prints from artuk.org.

For all image licensing enquiries, please contact us using the contact form.

Our collection of 2,132 oil paintings can also be explored on Art UK. Here you can also discover 212,732 artworks, explore 3,261 venues and meet 38,370 artists. Art UK is the online home for every public art collection in the UK.

For all works that are out of copyright, Manchester Art Gallery permits that an image of no larger than 1200×1200 pixels can be downloaded and reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike (BY-SA 4.0) licence. A credit line of “Image courtesy of Manchester Art Gallery” must be included.

For all works that are protected by copyright it is the responsibility of the requestor to determine copyright status and prior permission must be sought from the copyright holder before making a request. UK Copyright law must be adhered to at all times.

If you require a larger file, have a request for personal use and study, or want to ask something else please complete and submit the details below. Multiple objects can be included in a single request. Please note that Manchester Art Gallery operates a commercial image library and where appropriate charges a fee to licence use of high-resolution image files to support a program of improving the photography of the collection.