Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester 1857
The Art Treasures of Great Britain was an exhibition of fine art held in
Background
Manchester was a small provincial town in the medieval period, but by 1855 it was an industrial city with 95 cotton mills and 1,724 warehouses.[5] It was visited by French historian Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835, who scathingly wrote:[4]
A sort of black smoke covers the city ... From this foul drain, the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilise the world.
Manchester gained city status in 1853, and the exhibition was financed by the city's increasingly affluent business grandees, who were motivated by a desire to demonstrate their cultural attainment, and inspired by the Paris International Exhibition in 1855, the Dublin Exhibition in 1853, and the Great Exhibition in 1851. There had already been an "Exposition of British Industrial Art in Manchester" in 1845.[6] Unlike these earlier exhibitions, the Manchester exhibition was restricted to works of art without any industrial or trade items on display.[7]
The idea for an exhibition in Manchester was first expressed in a letter sent on 10 February 1856 by John Connellan Deane, son of Irish architect Sir
A General Committee established in May 1856, chaired by the
Exhibition hall
The exhibition was held outside the city centre, on a three-acre site in
C.D. Young & Co, of London and Edinburgh – already engaged as builders of the new art museum in South Kensington (which later became the V&A) – were appointed as contractors to build a temporary iron-and-glass structure similar to the Crystal Palace in London, 656 feet (200 m) long and 200 feet (61 m) wide, with one central barrel vault 56 feet (17 m) wide with a 24 feet (7.3 m) wide hip vault on either side roofing a 104 feet (32 m) wide central gallery running the length of the building, and narrower barrel vaults 45 feet (14 m) wide to either side, all crossed by a 104 feet (32 m) transept towards the western end.[10] The design of the main structure has been attributed to Francis Fowke,[11] who later designed the Natural History Museum in London, and an ornamental brick entrance at the eastern end was designed by local architect Edward Salomons. The materials used included 650 long tons (660 t) of cast iron, 600 long tons (610 t) of wrought iron, 65,000 square feet (6,000 m2) of glass and 1.5 million bricks.[8]
Internally, the building included a large hall, with corrugated iron sides and vaults supported by iron columns, with space for an orchestra at one end and a large
Over the entrance was inscribed the first line of John Keats's Endymion: "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever". By the exit was a line from Alexander Pope's Prologue to Joseph Addison's Cato: "To wake the soul by tender strokes of art".
The hall also included two public refreshment rooms, First Class and Second Class, later supplemented by a tent outside, and a separate royal reception room. Following his visit, American author Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that, in the Second Class refreshment room:[7]
John Bull and his female may be seen in full gulp and guzzle, swallowing vast quantities of cold boiled beef, thoroughly moistened with porter or bitter
Works exhibited
The exhibition comprised over 16,000 works split into 10 categories: Pictures by Ancient Masters, Pictures by Modern Masters, British Portraits and Miniatures, Water Colour Drawings, Sketches and Original Drawings (Ancient), Engravings, Illustrations of Photography, Works of Oriental Art, Varied Objects of Oriental Art, and Sculpture. The collection included 5,000 paintings and drawings by "Modern Masters" such as
The works were organised chronologically, to demonstrate the development of art, with works from northern Europe on one wall contrasted with contemporaneous works from southern Europe on the facing wall. Although the collection included works from Europe and the Orient, it had a clear emphasis on British works.[4]
Most public British collections were in a nascent state, so most of the works were borrowed from 700 private collections. Many had never been exhibited in public before. The exhibition included the
La collection de Manchester vaut à peu près le
Louvre("Manchester's collection is worth almost as much as the Louvre's").
Not all private owners responded positively to the committee's entreaties to lend their works of art. William Cavendish, 7th Duke of Devonshire reportedly declined, replying contemptuously: What in the world do you want with art in Manchester? Why can't you stick to your cotton spinning?[4]
Visitors
The exhibition was opened by Prince Albert on 5 May 1857, in mourning following the death of
Season tickets were sold in advance for 2
The exhibition attracted more than 1.3 million visitors – about four times the population of Manchester in 1857.
Friedrich Engels wrote to Karl Marx about the exhibition: "Everyone up here is an art lover just now and the talk is all of the pictures at the exhibition".[5]
To entertain the visitors,
A temporary "Art Treasure Hotel" housed some visitors overnight, and others were directed to local boarding houses.The exhibition gave rise to several different publications. The committee published a 234-page catalogue, a series of "Handbooks" by type of object, and an illustrated weekly periodical "The Art Treasures Examiner". An apparently satirical book by "Tennyson Longfellow Smith" of "Poems inspired by Certain Pictures at the Art Treasures Exhibition" was illustrated with caricatures. A 16-page booklet was titled the "What to see, and Where to see it: The Operative's Guide to the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition" (an "operative" was the operator of a machine, as in a mill).[6]
Sales of season tickets raised more than £20,000, added to daily admission fees amounting to nearly £61,000. Another £8,111 was raised by selling over 160,000 catalogues, plus £239 from selling concert programmes. Almost £1,500 came from the charges for safe-keeping of personal effects at the cloakroom, and £3,346 from the refreshments contract.
Aftermath
From gross receipts of £110,588 9s. 8d., the exhibition made a small profit of £304 14s. 4d, a good result compared to the crippling £20,000 loss made by the Dublin Exhibition, which ruined its organiser William Dargan. The railway that transported visitors to the site did even better, making a profit of about £50,000. After the exhibition ended, the exhibited works were returned to their owners, and the temporary building and its contents were auctioned. Glass display cases were bought by the new museums under construction in South Kensington. The building was entirely demolished by November 1858. Having cost over £37,000 in all, the materials comprising the building sold for little more than £7,000; internal fittings and decorations that cost £18,581 sold for £2,836.
The site became part of Manchester Botanical Gardens, and was used to hold a Royal Jubilee Exhibition in 1887, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Queen Victoria's accession to the throne. The gardens closed in 1907, becoming White City Pleasure Gardens in 1907 and near the present-day White City Retail Park.[12]
The exhibition was used as a model for the display of art in public galleries during the second half of the 19th century. Although the works displayed were returned to private collections, many found their way into public collections over the following decades, having usefully boosted their reputation by their appearance in Manchester. The National Portrait Gallery in London had been founded in 1856 and opened its doors to the public in 1858. Scharf was its first director, and arranged the displays in chronological order, as the Manchester exhibition had done.
A second but smaller National Art Treasures Exhibition was held in
An exhibition was held at Manchester Art Gallery in 2007–08 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Art Treasures Exhibition,[2][14] and a conference was held at the University of Manchester in November 2007.[15]
References
- ^ Exhibition of art treasures of the United Kingdom, held at Manchester in 1857. Report of the executive committee, 1859. Many details in this article are taken from this comprehensive record of the exhibition.
- ^ a b Art Treasures in Manchester: 150 years on, Manchester Art Gallery
- ^ a b Art Treasures Exhibition Returns To Manchester After 150 Years, Culture24, 5 October 2007
- ^ a b c d e The Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester, 1857, Suzanne Fagence Cooper, Antiques, June 2001 Archived 11 March 2007 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ a b Art Treasures in detail, Manchester Art Gallery and subpages
- ^ a b Catalogue of the books in the Manchester free library: Reference department
- ^ a b Art Treasures: The birth of the blockbuster, The Daily Telegraph, 13 November 2007
- ^ ISBN 1-85928-419-1, pp.8–13
- ^ Hayes, Louis M (1905). Reminiscences of Manchester. London & Manchester: Sherratt & Hughes. p. 193.
- ^ ISBN 0-7190-5606-3, pp.77–78
- ISBN 0-7190-1330-5, p.151
- ^ a b c d The greatest art show ever?, BBC Manchester, 19 March 2008
- ^ 'Art Treasures' Exhibition, 1857, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 99, No. 656 (Nov. 1957), pp. 361–363
- ^ "A Joy for Ever": the Manchester Art-Treasures Exhibition in Print, Manchester Art Gallery, 2007
- ^ Art, City Spectacle: Revisiting the 1857 Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition Junior Conference Archived 27 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine, University of Manchester, 2007
53°27′42″N 2°17′04″W / 53.4617371°N 2.2843194°W
External links
- Drawing of the Art Treasures Exhibition Building
- Art Treasures in Manchester: 150 years on — Part one
- Art Treasures in Manchester: 150 years on — Part two
- List of photographic exhibits
- John Peck: Catalogue of the art treasures of the United Kingdom: collected at Manchester in 1857 Internet Archive – online
- CALDESI & MONTECCHI (ACTIVE 1857-67) Photographs of the "Gems of the Art Treasures Exhibition", Manchester