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This article was downloaded by: [Ams/Girona*barri Lib] On: 17 October 2014, At: 01:16 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gncc20 The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857: Entrepreneurs, Connoisseurs and the Public Pamela Fletcher a a Department of Art , Bowdoin College Published 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 Interdisciplinary Journal, 35:1, 96-98, DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2013.770628 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2013.770628 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions

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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

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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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