IT IS the jewel in Southampton’s crown – but for years much of it has been hidden from the public eye.

The city owns one of the best collections of modern art outside London.

Due to the size of the collection and a lack of space many of the pieces are unable to be shown and are kept in vaults - leading to the Daily Echo's Show us the Monet campaign to get more of it on show to the public.

But now after a major cash injection much more of the £200million collection – which includes two paintings by impressionist master Claude Monet, Fishermen Upon A Lee Shore by English landscape legend Turner and Red Movement by optical artist Bridget Riley – will be able to go on public show.

Arts Council England have awarded more than £1m to Hampshire museums and galleries in a bid to revitalise the region’s art scene.

Southampton City Art Gallery has been given £450,000 to fund an 18 month project that is hoped will release more of it’s 5,300 piece collection for public show.

City art experts will be working with the The Sainsbury Gallery, in Basingstoke, Winchester Discovery Centre, Gosport Gallery and the St Barbe Museum in Lymington to get the city’s artwork seen by a wider audience.

The St Barbe Museum will receive £149,400 to help get more people through the doors and seven Isle of Wight museums hope to attract more visitors with a grant of £100,000.

The museums are part of a group of 16 organisations across the south west who will receive a total of £2,538,690 in this round of Arts Council England’s “museum resilience fund”.

The total invested across the country in this round is £12.3 million.

The John Hansard Gallery, which will move from Southampton University’s Highfield Campus to the city centre’s new purpose built arts complex in 2017 was awarded the maximum grant of £150,000 from ACE’s Catalyst Evolve pot to help the gallery attract more sponsors.

Development manager Amy O’Sullivan said: “About 25 per cent of the grant is for redeveloping the website and setting up a patron scheme.

“The rest will come as match funding so any money we get from new sponsors will be matched by the Arts Council up to the value of £150,000.

“It’s a really good way of leveraging new funding - to build new relationships and be able to say if you donate £200 this year it’s worth £400 to us.”

The match funding will be available for the next three years and corporate sponsors will now be able to donate – as well as any private sponsors.

Southampton city council’s culture boss Satvir Kaur said: “Our issue has always been that we’ve got so much art to offer but it’s about coordinating and channelling it. This is hopefully the beginning and the new John Hansard gallery is going to be absolutely phenomenal.”

The money raised will go towards new exhibitions and the gallery’s education programmes.