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This article was downloaded by: [Ams/Girona*barri Lib]On: 17 October 2014, At: 01:16Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Nineteenth-Century Contexts: AnInterdisciplinary JournalPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gncc20
The Manchester Art TreasuresExhibition of 1857: Entrepreneurs,Connoisseurs and the PublicPamela Fletcher aa Department of Art , Bowdoin CollegePublished online: 04 Mar 2013.
To cite this article: Pamela Fletcher (2013) The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857:Entrepreneurs, Connoisseurs and the Public , Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An InterdisciplinaryJournal, 35:1, 96-98, DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2013.770628
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2013.770628
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These two volumes, then, are surely not the last word in James scholarship, but their
contribution is huge and, after nearly a century, deeply welcome.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2013.770626 LINDA SIMON
Department of English
Skidmore College
# 2013, Linda Simon
The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857: Entrepreneurs, Connoisseurs
and the Public
ELIZABETH A. PERGAM
Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2011
xvi + 368, 12 color and 53 b&w illustrations. ISBN 978-1409418306
The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 brought over 16,000 works of art,
including Old Masters, modern painting and sculpture, photography, and works in
other media, together in a massive exhibition in the heart of England’s industrial
north. In the five and a half months of its existence, over 1,300,000 viewers visited
the exhibition, making it, in Pergam’s words, “a blockbuster avant la letter” (1).
This description encapsulates Pergam’s central argument that this exhibition was a
watershed moment in the history of art, but one that has been sidelined in large
part because art historians tend to focus on the metropolitan capitals of Paris and,
to a lesser extent, London at the expense of other, so-called “provincial” cities. In
this book, Pergam sets out to repair this omission, and to trace the implications of
the Manchester exhibition on Victorian exhibition culture, the development of the
discipline of art history, and the formation of major public museums in the later
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition was a massive – and massively well-
documented – undertaking. Pergam has worked with the archive in great depth
and the result is a thorough and detailed accounting of all aspects of the exhibition.
Organized as a private enterprise and run by an Executive Committee of local business
leaders, the exhibition was a concerted attempt to establish Manchester’s cultural
status at a time when its economic and industrial identity was paramount. As
Pergam recounts in the first chapter, these men’s business acumen was a tremendous
asset in the organizational work of raising money, soliciting the loan of artworks from
hundreds of private collectors and artists, managing the logistics of transporting
thousands of works of art and hundreds of thousands of visitors, and building an exhi-
bition space. Despite the critical role that commercial forces played in organizing the
exhibition, however, Pergam notes that the Executive Committee always positioned
the exhibition as a philanthropic and cultural event, in what she argues was a critical
moment in the formation of the idea of the museum as a non-commercial space.
The second chapter is a detailed examination of the presentation of the exhibition,
from the glass and iron structure built to house it to the innovative hanging of the
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pictures in a systematic chronological arrangement. In the third chapter, Pergam
examines the many printed guidebooks produced by the exhibition organizers and
others, tracking the class-based differences in how the art on view was presented to
the multiple sub-publics that attended the exhibition.
In the book’s last two chapters, Pergam turns to an analysis of the significance and
impact of the exhibition. In the long fourth chapter entitled “Practicing Art History,”
she offers a fascinating series of case studies of how the works of different artists –
including Giotto, Bellini, Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Gainsborough – were attrib-
uted, interpreted, and located within the larger narrative of art history in both the
planning for and response to the exhibition. She argues that because the exhibition
included a comprehensive range of European art from the Trecento to the present,
and because the organizers chose to arrange the works according to chronology and
national school, in ways that emphasized questions of attribution, period style, and
comparative analysis, the discussion of the exhibition became a writing of art
history. A particularly interesting point within this larger discussion is the way that
discussion of art-historical questions echoed and amplified contemporary debates
about art, as in discussions over the role of Academic training and practice in the
work of the Carracci family and in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Indeed, through-
out the book, Pergam convincingly makes the point that the organizers’ unusually
thoroughly documented discussions of best hanging practices or the function of exhi-
bition catalogues shed light not only on the exhibition itself, but also on large issues
within the emergent exhibition culture of the 1850s.
The final chapter takes up the question of the exhibition’s influence on the develop-
ment of public art museums. As commentators assessed the impact of the exhibition,
one repeated question was how effective it had been in educating members of the
working classes and others unfamiliar with fine art. Pergam analyzes some of these
debates, and concludes that these educational expectations raised awareness of the
need to professionalize the role of the curator and art historian as interpreters of art
for the public. She also traces the later history of some of the works displayed,
noting that a quarter of the paintings exhibited are now in public art collections (a
complete listing of these paintings is contained in an appendix). This history is a tes-
tament to the high quality of the loans secured by the organizers, but also reflects the
history of the financial stresses on aristocratic collectors and the opportunities of the
art market as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth. Pergam is more inter-
ested, however, in using these histories to measure the influence of the exhibition. She
persuasively suggests that the provenance of having been included in the exhibition
added value to individual works when they entered the market, in an early example
of the benefit big loan exhibitions can bring to collectors as well as to museums.
Pergam also suggests that the fact that many works exhibited in Manchester ended
up in American collections is a sign that the Art Treasures Exhibition was a critical
influence on the development of American museums. This is a larger claim that the
overlap in pictures and the parallels between the motivations and assumptions of
the wealthy businessmen creating and supporting public art exhibitions and collec-
tions in both Manchester and the United States can support, as least as treated here.
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There is a larger history of other cities, institutions, and theorists that would need to be
addressed in order to make the direct connection Pergam implies, but her real point
seems to be that the 1857 exhibition is an overlooked point of origin for many of these
histories, and that case she makes entirely persuasively. Indeed, the book is an exemp-
lary model for the close examination of a single exhibition, and a welcome addition to
the burgeoning scholarship on nineteenth-century exhibition culture and museum
history, which will now have to contend as seriously with the Manchester Art Treasures
Exhibition of 1857 as it does with London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 or Paris’s Expo-
sition Universelle of 1855.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2013.770628 PAMELA FLETCHER
Department of Art
Bowdoin College
# 2013, Pamela Fletcher
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