The museum also provides a programme of temporary exhibitions, music performances, creative workshops, family events, talks and lectures.

The museum reopened in May 2011 after restoration and an extension designed by Eric Parry Architects, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

[2] Details of the circumstances and pattern of Sir William's collecting are unclear, but to inherited Chinese armorial porcelain, silver and portraits he added seventeenth and eighteenth-century silver and porcelain, Italian maiolica and bronzes, Old Master paintings, portrait miniatures, books and furniture and a variety of other smaller items including Roman glass, coins, enamels, seals, gems and snuff boxes.

[3] In 1882 Sir William's collection of over 4,000 objects, pictures and books was bequeathed to the people of Bath by his sister, Mary Anne Barbara Holburne (1802–1882).

Similarly, the scope of the oriental ceramics collection has been widened, with earlier pieces bequeathed by the collectors J Murray Elgar in 1955[7] and George Warre in 1938.

[8] Significant acquisitions have greatly increased the museum's collection of British eighteenth and early nineteenth-century paintings and miniatures.

These loans include: Hans Burgkmeier's portrait of Jakob Fugger and Sybilla Artzt and Albrecht Durer's engravings of Christ's Passion.

[13] Alongside the permanent collection and long-term loans, the Holburne Museum also hosts many exhibitions focusing on many different types of art.

There were generally three evening galas each summer, usually on the birthdays of George III and the Prince of Wales, and in July to coincide with the Bath races.

This led to a delay of more than a year before Bath and North East Somerset Council's planning committee approved the design in 2008.

[25] As built the three-storey extension is vertically articulated by mullions of brown/green mottle-glazed ceramic, intended to reflect the rhythms and foliage of mature trees in the Gardens.

The intermediate floors in the extension provide a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ display of previously stored items from the Holburne's collection.

[13] The Picture Galley (Brownsword Gallery) was refurbished in March and April 2022 with a new coat of paint and a new rehanging of the portraits that are exhibited in there.

Sydney Gardens provided a favourite walk for Jane Austen who set part of her novel Northanger Abbey across from the Holburne in Great Pulteney Street.

[27] It can be seen in the German TV film Four Seasons starring Tom Conti and Michael York, and in the Bollywood movie Cheeni Kum (2006).