Owned by North Yorkshire Council, it has a collection of over 2,000 items, mainly 19th- to 21st-century artworks, including pieces by local artists.

[1][2] In 1984 the Harrogate Fine Art Collection was stored in the basement of the Royal Baths, but the cellar flooded, destroying some works.

After she stepped down in 2020, May Catt of Harrogate Borough Council said, "Without the Friends with Judith at the helm, the Mercer would not have been able to establish itself as the excellent arts venue that it is today".

[12] From October 2012 until January 2013 the gallery again held the Harrogate Open Exhibition, featuring 206 works including ceramics, jewellery, sculpture, prints and paintings.

[13] In 2014, the Mercer showed its Facing the Future exhibition, which featured 18th- to early 20th-century sculpture and paintings from its own collection.

It included many of its works by William John Seward Webber, and examples of works by Florence Fitzgerald, daughter of John Anster Fitzgerald, Pietro Castoldi, Giovanni Maria Benzoni, Anthony Welsh, Thomas Holroyd, Bernard Walter Evans, Adrien Carpentiers and Frances Darlington.

[15][16] Between February and June 2019 the gallery held its Linescapes exhibition, featuring the printmaker Ian Mitchell's digitally-created prints of the Yorkshire landscape, which had been pared back to "minimalist lines and shapes".

[17] From June 2019 the gallery opened its William Powell Frith: The People's Painter exhibition, in honour of the bicentenary of his birth.

Paintings of Yorkshire by contemporary artists Anna Lilleengen, Katherine Holmes, Debbie Loane, Emerson Mayes and Ed Kluz were hung alongside those by Turner.

Reviewer Graham Chalmers said: "Celebration is a simply stunning collection of nearly 60 paintings by 12 different British Abstract artists - several on a heroic scale".

[29] Between May and September 2024, the gallery featured artist David Remfry's pencil and watercolour portraits of people and dogs in its We Think the World of You exhibition.

At the same time it was showing the drawings and silhouettes of a newly rediscovered early-20th-century female artist, in its Eva Leigh Walker exhibition.

[1] The Contemporary Art Society has funded a number of works in The Mercer's collection, including a set of Paintings of Literary Women by Sarah Pickstone.

[33] In 2022 the gallery lent some items for The Art of Colour, a free, non-commercial exhibition held by Tennants auctioneers in Leyburn.

James Thomas Linnell, Arthur Lowe, Lowes Dalbiac Luard, Ernest Stephen Lumsden, Bernard Meninsky, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Patrick Nasmyth, John Nesbitt, Albert Julius Olsson, Henry Perlee Parker, Emily Murray Paterson, John Pearson, William Bruce Ellis Ranken, John Nicholas Rhodes, Pieter Rijs, Robert Ernest Roe, Felix Schlesinger, Wilhelm Heinrich Schlesinger, Marck Senior, William Shackleton, Walter Sickert, Joseph Silcock, Frank Spenlove-Spenlove, George Blackie Sticks Joseph Thors, Charles Towne, Franz Richard Unterberger, Hendrik Verschuring, Edward Wadsworth, George Frederic Watts, William John Seward Webber, William Tatton Winter, Christopher Wood, and Philips Wouwerman.

[35] According to historian Malcolm Neesam, "it was paid for by a group of doctors who realised that if patients extended their visits at Harrogate to enjoy the entertainments provided, the medical profession would surely benefit".

[36] Between 1900 and 1991, the building was subject to various uses by Harrogate Council, for example the spa's Mechano-Therapeutic Department, and later the office of the borough treasurer.

Two high pavilions, "with steep ashlar fishtail slate roofs of French type with ornamental cast iron crestings",[37] were designed by Hiscoe.

[37] Hiscoe's interior refurbishment included an internal hall with coffered ceiling, and two new rooms either side of the front door.

[36] English Heritage now describes the hall as a "5-bay assembly room with coved cornice and arched windows"; the coffered ceiling is now gone.