IT’S an arts first .... the whole of the Rugby Collection is on show for the first time.

There’s been an exhibition of about half the collection each summer since the Rugby Art Gallery and Museum opened in its current premises.

But now there are 175 pieces to see from portraits and landscapes to buildings, printworks, war artists, crowd scenes, abstracts, interiors and still life work.

The collection was bought for the town from 1946, and holds some fantastic works by people who are some of the most successful and best-known artists in the country.

The quality on show is quite astonishing for a local authority collection with a refreshing number of works by women artists.

Proving how many big names there are here, Graham Sutherland’s Round Hills looks like one of the Pembrokeshire landscapes recently on show in Oxford, and there’s The Fig Tree, a solitary chalk drawing by Lucian Freud.

John Minton’s Corsican Landscape is a Cezanne-like many-coloured painting, and L S Lowry’s Monday Morning is a contrast, with slim figures trudging into a factory.