Maidstone College

Art classes were started on 29 January 1867 in the Picture Gallery of the Charles' Museum in St Faith's Street on the initiative of the Reverend Henry Collis (1835 - 1905), the local Vicar at St. Philip's, Maidstone. Collis was greatly interested in art and an enthusiastic educationalist. The classes were placed under the care of a Master, James Bell Williamson, a landscape and figurative painter who came from Northern Ireland, and who remained in post for the next twenty years.

Towards the end of that same year, in September 1867, the classes moved again, through the goodwill of the Earl of Romney, to the College Buildings, now known as the College of All Saints in College Avenue which had been founded by Archbishop Courtenay in 1395.

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