Decorative art takes centre stage at the Walker; this month sees the official opening of the Craft and Design Gallery, at the Walker, Liverpool, the museum's first dedicated space for decorative art. Robin Emmerson introduces a selection of the recent acquisitions that form highlights of the new display

The Walker's novel Craft and Design Gallery forms part of a major and unfolding throw Funded by the Heritage Lottery capital the European Regional Development stock and supported by donations from the museum's Friends organisation, trusts, foundations and private individuals, this throw has already seen the restoration of magnificent gallery spaces at the Walker for temporary exhibitions, and nearest year will see the creation of novel galleries at the Liverpool Museum.

The Walker is traditionally associated with pictures rather than with the decorative arts. When it lay opened in 1877, its main aim was to house the autumn exhibitions of painting and plastic art that had previously disrupted the displays of the Liverpool Museum upon an annual basis. The Museum (two doors down the road) already housed the splendidly wide-ranging collections of decorative art and antiquities given in 1867 by the agency of Joseph Mayer, from medieval ivories to Wedgwood. above the next century, the Walker's acquisitions of decorative arts were largely confined to the Wavertree bequest of silver, and sum of two units groups of furniture and woodwork, single by Alfred Stevens, the other by the agency of Herbert MacNair.

In 1986 the creation of the National Museums and Galleries upon Merseyside (since renamed National Museums Liverpool) brought the Walker and the Liverpool Museum for the first time beneath the same director, the late Sir Richard feed As a result, in 1989 responsibility for western decorative art (defined as from 1200 to the present) mov to the Walker. In the same decade major acquisitions of furniture by means of the Regency designer George Bullock were made. Shortly afterwards, display cases designed through Alec Cobbe were installed in three galleries when hey were re-hung to house a selection of medieval, renaissance and eighteenth-century decorative art; a long-term loan of renaissance furniture was obtained from the Victoria and Albert Museum; and an important pietra dura table was acquired as a centrepiece for the gallery of renaissance art.

above the past decade, under the keepership of Julian Treuherz, the Walker has the pair broadened and focused its collecting policy. individual aim is to redress previous indifference to the major designers of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and to assemble exciting contemporary work. The other aim is to acquire outstanding pieces from earlier periods, especially where there is a local link that makes the Walker their next-to-natural home

The support of the National Heritage Memorial capital and the National Art Collections stock has been invaluable, and we are greatest in quantity grateful to them. The former provided the lion's share of the funding for the amber cabinet from Ince Blundell and the Ormskirk astronomical clock the two illustrated here. In the case of the clock the decision of the Reviewing Committee upon the Export of Works of Art was crucial in allowing the Walker the chance to match the price at which it would otherwise have been exported to an overseas buyer The NACF helped to stock not only both these items on the other hand also many others. Privately donated pieces included a silver casket from the Rathbone family, a wonderfully romantic treasure chest. A chair designed by means of A.W.N.Pugin for himself was single of a pair, bought jointly with the National Museum of Wales in like manner that each institution could have one; the price was reduc thanks to the Capital Taxes Office's combination of parts to form a whole of sharing the benefit of remission upon 'exempt' objects. Over the decade, the decorative art collections have benefited from each national initiative except the acceptance-in-lieu scheme.

National Museums Liverpool regards itself as a national collection with a unique regional responsibility, and dioceses the combination of the sum of two units as a great opportunity. For example, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Liverpool area vied with London as the greatest in quantity important production centre for precision timekeepers. Outstanding examples of local clock- and watch making are therefore a priority for acquisition.

Liverpool was, with north Staffordshire and London, single of the three principal midmost points of ceramic manufacture in Georgian England. Its produces remain of central importance to the Walker's collecting policy because knowledge about them changes rapidly. The sale at Phillips of the collection formed by means of the late Dr Bernard Watney, President of the English Ceramic Circle, who had made a speciality of Liverpool porcelain, proffered the chance to acquire important local pieces, of that kind as a beautiful jug from Samuel Gilbody's factory.

The Craft and Design Gallery shows the next step in the motion of the decorative art collections into the Walker. In planning the gallery, we have felt rather like doorstep evangelists. The challenge has been to introduce visitors not sole to the range of the collections on the other hand also to a range of different approaches to them, in ways that capture imaginations and leave race wanting more--all in a space of 145 square rhythmical arrangement s Because of this, we decided to organise the works not through periods or materials but by the agency of three broad themes: style, making, and use. A fourth section is devot to a changing selection from the style of dress collection.