From the English Civil War until the early years of Victoria's reign, visual art in Britain was largely associated with both the profligate aristocracy and idolatrous Catholicism. However, in the middle of the nineteenth century, through a variety of factors—the burgeoning middle-class art market, the emergence of new art criticism, and the example of new art movements such as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, to name a few—art became connected to morality and even to Protestant religiosity. As a result of art's new moral status, reformers began to advocate art as a potentially active and democratic force for making nature, beauty, and the morality of expressive labor available in the industrial city.Footnote 1 By paying close attention to how these ideas led to the formation of art museums, we can better understand how different social classes have used art, the transformation of art's role in the modern, industrial world, and the complex interplay between ideas and local context.Footnote 2
This article traces the moralizing ideas behind the formation of city art museums in three cities—Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester—that established their museums of (largely contemporary) art in 1867, 1877, and 1883, respectively. These key English cities, the largest outside of London, all competed to be the leading “second English city.” As others have recognized, museums emerged in the nineteenth century as vital sites for class expression: the middle classes showed their cultural uniqueness—their difference from both the aristocracy and the working classes—through precisely this kind of cultural project.Footnote 3 Yet I will argue that these museums were not the product of a unified middle class but were the sites of continual battles between groups with conflicting visions of art's purpose and meaning.Footnote 4 Not everyone could accept the idea that beauty and fine work could communicate morality or that art could therefore be a beneficial force in society. Moreover, as we will see, elites’ traditional uses of art for display of wealth, power, and prestige often came into conflict with the drive to make art accessible to all. For some supporters, art museums were about social control, broadly defined: inducing the working classes to behave properly, enjoy respectable entertainment, and emulate their betters.Footnote 5 Indeed, class formation and social control in many ways go together; these efforts to regulate working-class behavior were as much an expression of middle-class aspiration as they were part of a larger attempt to preserve—or establish—social order.Footnote 6 However, the archives also reveal that reformers inspired by the ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris worked to establish art museums as part of a wider transformation of industrial society. Both of these middle-class ambitions—social control and bringing beauty to the masses—combined in these new institutions. At the same time, art museums could easily become part of the “ritual” spaces of middle-class use and display.Footnote 7
Have historians who analyze museums and other middle-class institutions as sites of social control thus recognized a key element of class formation and motivation but missed the level of reformers’ dissatisfaction with their world? Art can seem to us an unusual choice out of the many possible solutions to class conflict, urban blight, rampant ignorance, and frank unbelief. However, the histories of these three museums show the extent to which such institutions depended on several groups: highly motivated Ruskinians, who were convinced of art's efficacy and industrial society's glaring deficiencies; others who felt that museums would provide excellent models for working-class behavior; and the many citizens who enjoyed art museums’ prestige and cultural capital. Indeed, in this historical moment, “art” as a concept meant many things to many people and could fill many different social roles. Ultimately, cities built art museums because people invested art with unique powers. Reformers believed that art could effect social healing, promote moral and cultural regeneration, and train workers to become alive to beauty in the world and in design. Even those who did not accept art's reforming potential, however, felt that art had a particular ability to raise the civic profile and provide a key arena for genteel sociability. The very multiplicity of art's possible uses and its various champions mean that the histories of these three regional art museums allow us to examine the conflicts that emerged over the use and meaning of art. These conflicts show us the extent to which middle-class reformers acted out of differing motives, the depth of reformers’ discontent with industrial, capitalist society, and, finally, how ideas played out in different local circumstances. In practice, financial and social pressures often overwhelmed the idealists, and the reformers most firmly committed to using art as a means of promoting real social change often saw their pet projects turned into playgrounds for the middle class.Footnote 8
More generally, these case studies are a window onto the way that wider cultural ideas are put into practice, the way that Ruskin's “truth to nature” or Matthew Arnold's “sweetness and light” became embedded in institutions, collections, and buildings.Footnote 9 This development depended on a short-lived but deeply influential aesthetic ideology that understood painting as able to communicate ideas directly to all audiences (even the uneducated).Footnote 10 The emergence of painting styles that spoke to new classes of patrons and audiences in a “readable” way and articulation of the idea of what I call “art for society's sake” meant that reformers could adopt art as one of the most perfect solutions to the many problems of the nineteenth-century city. This idea that art was “readable” and could thus speak to anyone, regardless of education level, relied on treating paintings as “windows” onto their subjects, making the surface of the painting itself transparent. (Indeed, this proved to be the standard position that the museums’ educational materials such as catalogs and lectures would adopt, emphasizing subject over style or technique.)Footnote 11
Perhaps the greatest influence on this aesthetic ideology was Ruskin, who combined the Romantic idea of the artist as revealing the “invisible world” with Evangelical language that no doubt comforted his many middle-class readers.Footnote 12 Yet Ruskin's oeuvre was enormous, contradictory, and dense, and his ideas changed throughout his lifetime. His middle-class upbringing combined strict Evangelical doctrine, family trips in Europe, and art collecting, and from an early age he began developing a new mode of visual interpretation that would justify visual pleasure in terms of religious experience and, eventually, social critique.Footnote 13 His multivolume work Modern Painters brought a new urgency to art criticism, as he combined the campaigning zeal of A. W. N. Pugin and Thomas Carlyle with his own religiously inflected aesthetics.Footnote 14 From the first volume of Modern Painters, what we might call Ruskin's new “visual evangelism” emphasized the continuity of beauty and morality; he argued that the pleasure derived from beauty was based not on sensuality but on the perception of the divine.Footnote 15 It was thus the role of the artist to act as an “eye-witness” whose sight testified to the glory of nature as God's creation: “Nothing must come between Nature and the artist's sight; nothing between God and the artist's soul.”Footnote 16 Ruskin's The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice, written in between volumes of Modern Painters, applied his ideas to architecture and placed a new emphasis on social criticism.Footnote 17 His many works of the 1860s and 1870s, including the sprawling Fors Clavigera, became increasingly focused on the problems wrought by urban industrial capitalism.Footnote 18 Inspiring the works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and countless artists and reformers, including the prodigiously creative William Morris, Ruskin convinced many that art was both inherently moral and a potentially active force for improving the morality of society.
Contemporary ideas about the moralizing and reforming potential of art meant that city governments became responsible for the mental and spiritual health of their citizens by providing it. This use of art thus helped to expand and extend the role of government to include new aspects of citizens’ welfare, thereby forming a key part of the remaking of British government that had begun earlier in the century.Footnote 19 This happened only gradually; museums did not emerge fully formed from the heads of local government but came about through repeated attempts, failures, and renegotiations. This slow development of government-supported institutions, in turn, forced cities to confront new issues and remade British governance even before the great socialist transformations of the mid-twentieth century.Footnote 20 Indeed, in Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool, the movements to establish municipal art museums faced considerable opposition precisely because to do so meant a significant redefinition not only of art but also of the role of the local city council and of the very role of government in British society.
The case studies that follow connect ideas and social practice by addressing two principal questions: How did people use Ruskin's ideas about art as an active force in society to push these industrial cities to build art museums? How did these ideas get transformed by local conditions and competing interests? Ultimately, these histories show the development and enactment of a particular aesthetic ideology and the way that this created lasting institutions that—perhaps unsurprisingly—rarely lived up to their founders’ hopes. Each city gave art a slightly different meaning, even though the people I call “art reformers” believed they were following Ruskin's ideas about improving industrial society. At their most idealistic, they hoped that, as Manchester art reformer T. C. Horsfall put it, “beautiful and interesting things” in public galleries would offer the masses “religious feeling … [and] knowledge of the better part of the human nature common to them and their fellow creatures.”Footnote 21 In general, however, the art reformers spread and helped put into action four main ideas about art museums. In their arguments, art museums would (1) be a benign means of providing healthy recreation for the working classes, (2) improve worker satisfaction in pleasurable labor and industrial design by providing objects for study, (3) help workers lead more fulfilling lives by showing them the grace and beauty in the world, and (4) most radically, help audiences see the ugliness created by industrial capitalism and thus galvanize them to change both the modern urban environment and the system that created it.Footnote 22
Art reformers overcame long-standing British aversion to taxation, and even longer-standing suspicion of art as foreign, idolatrous, and aristocratic, to make cities provide art to their citizens.Footnote 23 In turn, however, governments transformed the meaning of art, putting it on the municipal payroll in order to proclaim the achievement of local self-rule and the success of the industrial city.Footnote 24 Embodying the contradictions and tensions in urban development and even in art itself, and perhaps despite the best intentions of their most ardent supporters, late nineteenth-century art museums could pursue civic prestige and still claim to be philanthropic. They could be—and were—used to justify the wealth that industrial capitalism generated, and they easily became clubs for the wealthy more than refuges for the poor. Art reformers like George Dawson, John Henry Chamberlain, and Whitworth Wallis in Birmingham, J. A. Picton and Philip Rathbone in Liverpool, and T. C. Horsfall and J. E. Phythian in Manchester hoped that art museums would both represent and realize a new relationship between the government and the governed, between the middle and working classes, between beauty and the industrial city. However, they worked in different political, social, and institutional contexts, which changed the ways that they could put their ideas into practice.
BIRMINGHAM
In Birmingham, art became a dominant metaphor in civic development, as the municipal government remade itself through the new “civic gospel” and rebuilt much of the city center over the course of the 1860s and 1870s. Birmingham was a manufacturing town with relatively stable employment and many small workshops, and the municipal art museum played a crucial role in embodying both the Town Council's new goals and the ruling elite's hope to connect all classes in the pursuit of beauty and good design. In Birmingham, debates about art focused on the extent to which good government might solve society's problems without prohibitively heavy rates of taxation and on how to make art accessible and useful for the greatest number of people. Ultimately, the city got an art museum through a clever use of the wealth and civic space created (literally) by Birmingham's municipal socialism.
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, Birmingham's Town Council met in a pub and had a reputation for penny-pinching narrow-mindedness.Footnote 25 Three influential Birmingham ministers—Unitarians George Dawson and H. W. Crosskey and Congregationalist R. W. Dale—helped to create the civic gospel by arguing that, as Dale put it, “perhaps a strong and able Town Council might do almost as much to improve the conditions of life in the town as Parliament itself.”Footnote 26 All three men gave municipal reform a spiritual meaning; although from different traditions of Dissenting Protestantism, they shared an emphasis on the duty of public service and the interpretation of Christianity as the emulation of Christ's work in the world.Footnote 27 George Dawson set the tone for much of the subsequent municipal reform. Like later art reformers, he understood the role of culture in terms deeply influenced by the works of John Ruskin. As the Spectator wrote, Dawson was “a kind of literary middleman between writers like Carlyle and Ruskin and those ordinary English manufacturers, or merchants, or tradesmen, who like thought but like it well illustrated.”Footnote 28 Dawson argued for the importance of beauty in everyday life; he judged the accomplishments of a society in terms of the beauty of its arts and the quality of its citizens’ lives, and he believed that art could bring people closer to God through nature.Footnote 29
In his sermon “Beauty and Purity in Towns,” Dawson interpreted Scripture in ways that show Ruskin's influence, particularly his idea of artistic truth to nature.Footnote 30 Ruskin frequently described art as a window on nature, which was itself a kind of sacred scripture.Footnote 31 Dawson made nature a mirror reflecting God's glory: “No man can see God and live, and therefore we have, as it were, our backs to Him, and Nature has spread out a mirror, so that we may see as much as possible for us without being dimmed with glory.”Footnote 32 His reading gave new social meaning and importance to the artist, who, Dawson said, “has a great vocation—to hold up the glass to Nature until man can behold the glory, and, looking into the picture, be tempted to go back to its original, and see, perchance for the first time, how glorious it is.”Footnote 33 Nature is God's mirror; art is nature’s.
We can trace the impact of these ideas by noting that the first four chairmen of the Free Libraries and Museums Committee were members of Dawson's congregation, as were others intimately involved in art education.Footnote 34 Other evidence comes from Crosskey's congregation, which included many of those who would most influence the cultural policy of the new municipal administration.Footnote 35 The resulting preponderance in the city's Liberal leadership of a Nonconformist, active Christianity was not lost on contemporaries; one critic wrote in 1871 that the Town Council was being taken over by “Unitarians, Dawsonites.”Footnote 36 A Ruskinian sense of the importance of art and culture thus became deeply embedded in these reformers’ visions of the ideal city. The Birmingham Liberal Party's efforts to expand the power of the Town Council developed alongside their efforts to expand the council's role in providing cultural and educational opportunities.Footnote 37
Another point in the Birmingham Ruskin network was local architect John Henry Chamberlain, who developed Ruskin-inspired Italian Gothic red-brick architecture for both public and private commissions.Footnote 38 He formed a remarkable collection of Ruskin's works, and his manuscript bibliography of this collection, beautifully written in a free calligraphy and decorated with illuminations and designs, is a wonderful expression of his close engagement with Ruskin's vast literary output.Footnote 39 Chamberlain made a lasting impact as the architect of the Central and Reference Library and the School of Art as well as of many municipal libraries and board schools. His son would eventually be assistant keeper of the Art Gallery from 1890 until he retired in 1927.Footnote 40 Chamberlain also designed meticulously rendered houses in an early arts and crafts style for both the future chair of the art museum committee, William Kenrick, and Mayor (later M.P.) Joseph Chamberlain.Footnote 41 In their private and public lives, these reformers believed that beauty could and should be part of any project of municipal improvement, not as an addition or afterthought but as its essential and ultimate goal.Footnote 42
William Morris brought Ruskinian ideas about art reform directly to Birmingham through his role as president of the Birmingham Society of Arts in 1879 and 1880. In speeches to that body, later published as “The Art of the People” and “The Beauty of Life,” Morris presented many of the ideas for which he is now best known.Footnote 43 He made Ruskin-inspired connections between beauty, art, nature, and labor: “beauty, which is what is meant by art, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life, if we are to live as nature meant us to; that is, unless we are content to be less than men.”Footnote 44 He urged his audience to transform the injustice and brutality of the industrial age, repeatedly promoting “art made by the people and for the people as a joy to both the maker and the user.”Footnote 45 He questioned the idea that the highest form of civilization means “conventional comforts” that enslave others by their production and gave his audience words to live by as part of a wider solution: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”Footnote 46 What is remarkable here is not just that Birmingham art supporters had these opportunities to hear such iconic speeches firsthand but that these ideas ultimately made it directly into the planning, collecting, and educational policy of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.
These ideas were put into practice when leading citizens—industrialists and professionals alike—remade Birmingham's local government in the 1860s and 1870s. In 1895, the Reverend R. W. Dale, looking back on those years, remembered that town councillors “spoke of sweeping away streets in which it was not possible to live a healthy and decent life; of making the town cleaner, sweeter, and brighter; of providing gardens and parks and music; of erecting baths and free libraries, an art gallery and a museum.”Footnote 47 Indeed, it is a testament to the change in the general attitude toward government provision of culture that this group's first attempt to adopt the Free Museum and Libraries Act failed to pass the Town Council in 1852 but succeeded eight years later with a new, reform-minded council.Footnote 48 Just three months after the Act had been adopted, the newly created Free Libraries Committee had developed an ambitious scheme: a “central Reference Library with Reading and News Rooms, a Museum and Gallery of Art, and four District Lending Libraries with News Rooms attached.”Footnote 49 While the Town Council worked on this, supporters of the plan set up the Birmingham and Midland Institute to privately address the same goals. Indeed, the Institute in many ways assisted the development of later municipal institutions, in the sense of forming an audience and constituency for reading, art, and education. But it also helped in very practical terms: the new municipal committee literally built on the work of the voluntary Institute by attaching rooms to its buildings for the new municipal institutions.Footnote 50 By 1867 the last part of the scheme was finished when one large room of the library was designated the municipal Art Gallery, exhibiting fifty-one paintings.Footnote 51
The 1870s saw two major changes that would significantly influence the Birmingham art museum in the following decade: a new willingness to undertake large expenditures and building schemes and an extension of the idea of civic improvement to include beautification projects. Schools, libraries, the Museum and Art Gallery, and new architecture advanced the council's educational mission and raised the profile and prestige of the council itself. Art and architecture became crucial tools as the Town Council rebuilt the city and expanded its responsibilities in this larger program of civic improvement, putting the ideas of Dawson and his followers into practice.Footnote 52 In 1875, Joseph Chamberlain (then mayor) stated explicitly that he gave £1,000 for the Industrial Museum “to show, in some practical way, my confidence in our Municipal Institutions.”Footnote 53 For Chamberlain, it would seem, each new project was part of the larger work of redefining city government. In the same year, the Free Libraries Committee reported that another gain had been made through a new and advantageous arrangement for a continuously revolving loan from the South Kensington Museum.Footnote 54 In keeping with the Ruskin-inspired idea that beauty would benefit all of Birmingham's citizens, these various bodies all worked to create a public museum that explicitly combined fine arts and craft.
The one-room Birmingham art museum founded in 1867 was enormously successful, perhaps more so than even its founders had hoped. Through gifts from individuals and several semipublic bodies, the art museum's collections and annual attendance rate grew until, by 1872, the Free Libraries Committee was urging the Town Council to increase its size.Footnote 55 The council at first merely attempted to expand the original buildings and then, when this proved impossible, to find a site and funds to erect a temporary Art Gallery in the center of town.Footnote 56 In fact, over the next eight years, the Art Gallery was stymied by its own success and that of the other cultural institutions with which it shared space. Private gifts and support had apparently outstripped the Town Council's ability to provide adequate physical housing for what it had established.Footnote 57 In 1880, private donations amounting to about £17,700 (including a gift of £10,000 from engineer brothers George and Richard Tangye) for objects for an art gallery and industrial museum if the Town Council provided a suitable structure, prompted the council to look for a way to build a permanent museum and art gallery.Footnote 58
The council found an ingenious way to use the profits of their recently municipalized gasworks, which allowed an elegant statement of the civic gospel and of Birmingham's municipal socialism: the Gas Committee built its own offices with an art gallery and museum on top, at its own expense, on land appropriated through the Libraries and Museums Act.Footnote 59 Thus, by owning the gasworks, the Town Council could build a more magnificent gallery than it otherwise could have afforded, with guaranteed year-round free entry and without raising local property taxes.Footnote 60 The Town Council ultimately approved a total cost of £92,500 out of the Gas Committee's funds for the Gas Offices and Art Gallery, which still adjoin the Italianate Council House in the center of town.Footnote 61
The new, permanent Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery opened on Saturday, 28 November 1885, with a celebration at the town hall and an address by the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII).Footnote 62 Its penny catalog, written by curator Whitworth Wallis, emphasized the purpose of its particular combination of fine and applied arts and the extent to which the project had been shaped by the ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris. Visitors must try to learn from the exhibits, Wallis wrote, “to make, if only at first in a small way, our manufactures, candlesticks, coal-boxes, spoons, or whatever it may happen to be, more and more beautiful. It is to our interest (to look at it in its most mercenary sense) to do so, and life will thus become more interesting both to the man who makes the article and to the one who uses it.”Footnote 63 (Note the echo of Morris's lecture five years before.) With its portico, campanile, and Italianate finishing, the building was a clear statement of the goals set up earlier by Dawson, Dale, and Crosskey and their followers that Birmingham might someday compete with Florence, Venice, and Pisa and make such cultural achievements available to all.Footnote 64 Physically embedded within the Council House and the Gas Offices, the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery's architecture established the connections that also appear in the administrative records: the gallery pronounced in stone the expanded responsibilities and prestige of the Town Council. Funded by a municipalized gasworks and filled with private wealth generated from the industries of the town, the museum aimed at making social relations and industrial design more harmonious. The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery shows the extent to which middle-class reformers, using the ideas of Ruskin and Morris, put the desire to make art and design available to a broad public at the center of their wider projects of urban reform.
LIVERPOOL
As in Birmingham, the men most active in promoting a municipal art museum in Liverpool did so through their adoption and adaptation of Ruskinian ideas about art, beauty, nature, and society. However, Liverpool's reformers were far more isolated within their community and did not pursue the same contact with or inspiration from Morris. The constraints of Liverpool's political and economic situation, as well as the ideas about art that these particular art reformers embraced, created a very different kind of institution. Key reformers J. A. Picton and Philip Rathbone were ultimately interested in making a gallery of fine (rather than applied) art available to all citizens. Although they tried repeatedly to create a permanent art museum with public funds, they were thwarted each time by the Town Council's politics of economy and a culture that identified art with decadence. Is art a luxury that should be maintained through private wealth and the free market? Or is it an engine of civilization and economic improvement, which should therefore receive public support? In ways very different from Birmingham, Liverpool ultimately found a compromise, using city infrastructure and private wealth to generate funds and gifts in order to create an art museum that largely benefited the upper classes, harnessing art to enhance the standing and prestige of the city and its government.
One of the world's greatest ports, Liverpool has looked as much to its trading partners in Europe, America, and Africa as to London; it is a city that still feels as if it turns its back on England to face the sea. Liverpool lacked the strong manufacturing base that fostered small-scale workshops in Birmingham or the variety of factory sizes and skilled trades that we will see in Manchester. Instead, Liverpool society contained a small number of extraordinarily wealthy merchants and shipowners, a larger number of struggling lower-middle-class clerks and tradesmen, and a vast pool of dock laborers and builders with varying degrees of skill but all suffering chronic unemployment. As a major center of immigration, Liverpool served as the entry, departure, and often final destination point for many of Britain's most desperate, especially after the midcentury Irish Famine. This was not only an influx of the poor and hungry; Liverpool's Irish population brought with it extremes of Catholic and Protestant identification, which the city's politicians exploited. The elite's fear of charity to the “undeserving” poor, combined with sectarian divisions, prevented a consensus on the need to educate or provide culture for the working classes and therefore frustrated the development of municipal socialism or reformist educational schemes.Footnote 65 In place of a unified and active city government, therefore, private networks developed to mitigate Liverpool's poverty or provide culture.Footnote 66 It is worth noting that unlike Birmingham, Manchester, or London, Liverpool had no significant movements to bring art to the poor.
Three town councillors, Liberals James Allanson Picton and Philip Henry Rathbone and Conservative Edward Samuelson, were the principal “Art Enthusiasts,” as Liverpool's Liberal Review called them.Footnote 67 A self-made architect and surveyor, Picton led the effort to establish a municipal library, art museum, and museum of natural history and was the chairman of the Library, Museum, and Gallery of Art Committee from its inception in 1852 until his death in 1889. Rathbone, scion of an old and wealthy Liverpool family, joined him on the Town Council in 1867 and served as the guiding light of the autumn exhibitions and the Walker Art Gallery's collection policy until his death in 1895. Both Picton and Rathbone championed a municipal art museum as fulfilling the Town Council's duty to reform and improve the city.
Picton and Rathbone were both deeply influenced by the ideas of John Ruskin and emphasized the importance of art, beauty, and nature as means of creating a good and just society.Footnote 68 Picton advocated municipal cultural institutions because he believed that cities—especially great commercial centers—were the basic nesting ground of civilization and that, as such, their governments should be active in promoting moral and intellectual progress.Footnote 69 He argued that municipal cultural institutions should never aim at the lowest common denominator but should provide the best examples available, because “a craving thirst for intelligence and enlightenment pervades all classes.”Footnote 70 He corresponded directly with Ruskin and tried to put his ideas into practice.Footnote 71 Rathbone also understood the city as greater than the sum of its parts and, like Ruskin, thought of art as an index of its society.Footnote 72 In an 1875 lecture given at the Liverpool library, he spoke “of Art as the embodiment of the highest thought and aspiration of a nation,” arguing that through art, “a perfect civilisation” would give individuals an understanding of their role and place within this “living organic whole” and of their contributions to the “grandeur and nobility of [the] community.”Footnote 73 Art could do this—could bring the citizens of Liverpool together and connect them to the wider world—because “the universality of Art forms a bond between all nations, causing us to feel and sympathise with all that is common to our human nature with a force not otherwise easily attainable.”Footnote 74 Like Picton, Rathbone explicitly rejected the ideas prevalent in Liverpool (and in Britain generally, as noted above) that art was an elitist and profane luxury.Footnote 75 Both felt that art could be the means of reconnecting a society torn apart by change and that city government would fulfill its potential if it harnessed the power of art for the public good.
From the beginning, Picton had grand ambitions; as soon as he joined the Town Council in 1849, he began advocating a municipal library and museums and initiated negotiations with the Liverpool Royal Institution over a transfer of their buildings and collections to the town.Footnote 76 Indeed, already in 1852, a gift of natural history collections from the earl of Derby prompted the council to raise property taxes in order to open the “Library, Museum, and Gallery of Art” in small rooms in the city center (although the Gallery of Art contained only the few paintings already owned by the city).Footnote 77 When the allocated building quickly became overcrowded, Picton urged the council to erect a purpose-built library, natural history museum, and art gallery. He had limited success; the council did eventually agree to purchase land for the project but balked at providing the funds to build. In 1857 the town was saved further expenditure when the wealthy merchant and Liberal M.P. William Brown paid to build the new Brown Library and Derby Museum of Natural History, which would not, however, contain an art museum.Footnote 78 This was an important first step for Picton, but he continued to try to get the Town Council to allocate funds for a separate, purpose-built city art museum.
The council believed that art, as a luxury, should be provided through private effort. Picton did not try to refute this assumption; instead, he pointed out that the city would have to create an infrastructure in order to take advantage of private munificence. An art gallery needed the backing of the municipality to give collectors and donors enough confidence to support it.Footnote 79 (Indeed, this was very much part of the rationale behind the Birmingham scheme that was developing at roughly the same time.) Picton urged the council to build an ambitious institution that would allow room for the permanent display of painting and sculpture, for a school of design, and for annual exhibitions.Footnote 80 The Library, Museum, and Gallery of Arts Committee pursued this grand scheme doggedly, particularly after 1867, when the city received the Mayer collection of applied art and ethnography, and newly elected Councilor Rathbone joined the committee. Still, the basic problem was money; art remained defined as a luxury, and there was simply no political will to allocate city funds for a public art museum.
Throughout this period, the late 1860s and 1870s, art became a point of heated debate, at least among Liverpool's chattering classes. The press debated the proposed city art museum in terms of the role of government, the status of art, and, as the Liberal Review put it, “the work that there is for [art] to perform.”Footnote 81 Liverpool art dealer B. H. Grindley argued in an 1875 lecture that “one of the greatest levers in refining and improving mankind is undoubtedly Art … true art does not tend to luxury, which is extravagance: but to simplicity, which is but another name for truth.”Footnote 82 In contrast, the Liberal Review dubiously wrote, “If we were to believe all that we are told, we should arrive at the conclusion that the world is only to be regenerated by an acquaintance with Art. … It should always be borne in mind, that Art is luxury. As such it should and must be secondary to necessities.”Footnote 83 The Liberal Review rejected the art reformers’ claims for art and insisted that, as a luxury, art must come second to more pressing needs and should not receive government support.Footnote 84 One Liberal Review author found “laughable” the art reformers’ alleged ideas that under art's influence, “wife-beaters” would (as he put it) “turn into angels of sweetness and light,” couples living in sin would “fly to the parish church or the registrar's office,” or drunks would “be redeemed from the thraldom of the Drink Demon” and go to church socials (“which are, unhappily, at present called by the irreverent folks of these inartistic, not to say barbarous times, muffin struggles”).Footnote 85 In contrast, the art museum plan did find support in the much smaller and more specialized satirical journal the Porcupine, edited by working-class advocate Hugh Shimmin.Footnote 86 An 1868 Porcupine article argued that a “gallery for the display of works of art [was] not only desirable but indispensable” for improving industrial design and assured its readers that the “general voice of the public has proclaimed the necessity, and the carrying out of the project is merely a matter of time.”Footnote 87 Shimmin and his writers also bluntly stated that it was “discreditable to a large and opulent community like that of Liverpool that she has no Gallery of Art.”Footnote 88 Shimmin argued in favor of a municipal art gallery as a necessity rather than a luxury but, unlike Picton and Rathbone, did so largely on the grounds of economy and civic pride.
By the end of 1870, when Picton and Rathbone's efforts had failed to get the Town Council to act, the Library, Museum, and Gallery of Arts Committee held a special session to approve holding municipal autumn exhibitions in the Library and Museum building.Footnote 89 The committee had not given up on realizing a city art museum; in fact, the autumn exhibition was a way of working on a city art museum despite the Town Council. The following year, the committee reported that the first exhibition was a great success and that its modest profit had allowed for the purchase of works from the exhibition “for the Permanent Collection.”Footnote 90 The experiment worked. In 1873, just two years after the first autumn exhibition under municipal control, the increasing popularity of these exhibitions and a growing consensus that the city needed an art museum forced the Town Council to take up the question again.Footnote 91 However, Conservative brewer Andrew Barclay Walker preempted the council when, upon his election as mayor in November, he announced that he intended to give the town an art gallery.Footnote 92 The following year, the duke of Edinburgh laid the foundation stone of the new Walker Art Gallery, and that year the Town Council allocated a small fund for purchases for its permanent collection.Footnote 93 The Walker opened to the public on 6 September 1877, with a public holiday, processions, speeches, and grand banquets for the town's elite. Through municipal art sales and private generosity, the government became responsible for just that kind of cultural patronage that it had previously avoided.
The Walker's origins, however, had a lasting effect on the institution. Despite Picton and Rathbone's idealism, the extent of the Walker's commercial activities—which Picton and Rathbone helped devise as a means of getting around the Town Council's reluctance to spend money on art—meant that the gallery was not equally open and accessible to all classes. The Walker did not have the liberty that the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery enjoyed to put on free-entry loan exhibitions and provide consistent free entry to the permanent collection. Entry fees for the autumn exhibition and other events meant that for much of the year only those who were able and willing to pay a fee could take advantage of Liverpool's art museum.Footnote 94 Rather than striving to bring even the humblest worker into contact with the benefits of civilization, as Picton and Rathbone hoped, or exposing workers to examples of industrial design, as Shimmin had advised, the Walker became a very visible means of enhancing the reputation of the city and its government through high-profile social events and exhibitions.Footnote 95 Part of this use of the art gallery stemmed from Liverpool's status as an international port, and indeed the list of visitors to the Walker that appears in an 1887 report is certainly impressive—it includes dignitaries and royalty from Britain, Europe, the United States, Japan, Russia, Turkey, China, and the Sandwich Islands.Footnote 96 At the same time, the gallery offered a public meeting space available to anyone, regardless of affiliation; on separate occasions during the Walker's first decade, for example, both the Wesleyans and the Institute of Engineers rented it for national conference social events.Footnote 97 The municipal art gallery proved to be a very useful tool in presenting Liverpool to itself and to the outside world.Footnote 98 With their neoclassical architecture, the Brown Library, Derby Museum, and Walker Art Gallery embodied in stone Picton and Rathbone's references to the “great commercial cities of antiquity.” However, the art museum's policies, like its architecture, created a solemn temple of the fine arts for the educated rather than bringing “enlightenment [to] all classes.” In Liverpool, art remained a luxury rather than a necessity.
MANCHESTER
In its social and economic character, Manchester resembled Liverpool, with extremes of wealth and poverty, yet the art reformers’ projects there were more similar to those in Birmingham than to those in Liverpool. In Manchester, discussions about art and its social role revolved explicitly around the status of art as it related to industrial society itself. Was art a symbol of the success of industrialization, which brought benefits to all made possible by the wealth of a few? Or could art be a call to reform the society created by industry, reform that would make culture and beauty not a privilege but a right? That this is the case is not surprising; by the middle of the nineteenth century, Manchester had become the first model of unfettered industrial capitalism.Footnote 99 Recent scholarly work has considerably complicated the picture of Manchester's culture and society by refuting these earlier stereotypes.Footnote 100 Indeed, although the Liberal Manchester City Council never developed the rhetoric of Birmingham's civic gospel, the city experimented far earlier than Birmingham with municipal ownership of gas- and waterworks and undertook massive improvement schemes throughout the century. The middle class of Manchester debated what should and should not be a matter of state interference and, as in Birmingham and Liverpool, tended to give generously to crisis-driven philanthropic schemes while vigorously opposing local government projects that would increase taxes.Footnote 101 However, the stereotype of the “Manchester man”—interested only in personal gain at the expense of vast numbers of degraded workers—remained important for people at the time and influenced how they worked to change their city.
One of the first schemes to harness individual wealth for a grand public cultural project was the enormously successful Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, inspired by the 1851 Great Exhibition. Aided by the prince consort, the Manchester exhibition of privately owned Old Masters and contemporary art brought the then-notorious industrial city a new kind of fame as being able to wield cultural as well as economic and political power. Building on this triumph, the chairman of the Art Treasures Exhibition organizing committee, Thomas Fairbairn—partner in his father's large engineering firm and an active art enthusiast and patron—convened a meeting to establish a Manchester city art museum in 1860.Footnote 102 This spin-off project planned to exploit the new interest in art generated by the 1857 exhibition and to follow a similar model, hoping to build a collection from the wealth and generosity of local art patrons and to raise money locally from both workers and manufacturers. The 1860 scheme also looked to refashion the city's image, as one supporter of the city art museum project argued: “Do not let it be said that Manchester men have no higher pursuit than making money; but let us leave behind us some evidence, that while we were exercising our energy and industry in promoting our own interests, we were not unmindful of the source from which our benefits sprung, and that we tried by our influence and means to leave the community in every respect better than we found it.”Footnote 103 Such enthusiasm, however, did not outlive the next economic crisis. Support for Fairbairn's Free Art Gallery and Museum plan was never unanimous, but it might have gotten further than it did if not for the severe bout of layoffs and closures that hit Manchester in the wake of both overproduction and the end of American cotton imports during the Civil War.Footnote 104 However, the cotton famine helped create a more active city government and a new generation of reformers more interested in using art as a means of social reform than as a tool in civic boosterism.Footnote 105
Instead of Prince Albert's patriotic and proindustrial projects, it was Ruskin's cultural and social criticism that inspired the men who would in fact help make Manchester responsible for providing art. Their proposals came not from a sense of boundless optimism in unstoppable historical progress, but from a fear of the reality of industrial capitalism and its degrading effects on both the workers and those who consumed mass-produced goods. The first of these projects in Manchester received attention and impetus in 1877, when T. C. Horsfall wrote to the Manchester Guardian with a proposal for a Manchester art museum explicitly based on Ruskinian principles.Footnote 106 The Manchester Art Museum's liberal opening policies would benefit the working classes, its loan policies to schools and workingmen's clubs would increase the accessibility of exhibits, and it would make each exhibit understandable to the uneducated with a series of explanatory labels.Footnote 107 While this project got underway, Horsfall and other art reformers participated in the Ruskin Society, founded in Manchester in 1879, and, from 1880, organized a series of art exhibitions in the slum district of Ancoats (eventual home of Horsfall's Manchester Art Museum) through the Ancoats Recreation Society.Footnote 108 The Recreation Society's exhibition catalogs announced their reforming and moralizing intentions with epithets like Ruskin's “Life without Industry is guilt; Industry without Art is brutality,” from which the title of this article is taken.Footnote 109 This group of reformers ultimately helped to form the Manchester City Art Gallery, and they tried to have the new municipal art museum put their more radical art philanthropy ideas into practice.Footnote 110 Thus, as in Birmingham and Liverpool, the art reformers of Manchester participated together in a variety of public and private projects sharing general goals of art education for the working classes, based largely on ideas culled from Ruskin.
As the Manchester Art Museum, the Ruskin Society, and the Ancoats Recreation Society were gaining momentum, art-reforming members of the private Royal Manchester Institution began to think of it, as Ruskinian architect Thomas Worthington wrote, as “the future permanent Art Gallery of Manchester.”Footnote 111 In 1880, these Institution members proposed to their governing body that they “transfer the entire property as a public gift to the City of Manchester and to the custody of the Corporation [the City Council].”Footnote 112 The men interested in using art as a tool for social reform, many of them simultaneously working on the other art-reform projects around Manchester, were deeply involved in this new attempt to establish a public art museum through the reconstitution of the Royal Manchester Institution. These men were involved in the committees that promoted, and ultimately oversaw, the transfer of the Institution to the city.Footnote 113
These idealists were able to succeed in this project as well as they did because of two important factors: the declining profile of the Royal Manchester Institution and the simultaneous rise in prestige and visibility of several other municipal art museums, especially Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery, which piqued Manchester's civic pride and opened up possibilities for the municipal subsidization of art. They found that the Institution's “narrowing sphere of usefulness” contrasted with developments in Liverpool, where the art museum “seem[ed] to derive its chief strength from association with its rich and powerful Corporation [Town Council].”Footnote 114 They believed that, being under municipal control, the Walker Art Gallery could attract “through its power of purchase, more attractive and prominent Works,” and more visitors, as “the property of the People, who recognise that it is maintained for their advantage and enjoyment.”Footnote 115 They thus characterized Manchester's Institution as private, narrow, and unable to grow but found a successful model in the new municipal art museums, particularly that of Manchester's main rival. The reformers’ request led to negotiations and a successful transfer scheme by which the Institution presented its entire property, including land, building, and collections, to the City of Manchester as a public gift. The major achievements of the Institution's reformers lay in persuading the City Council to spend £2,000 annually on the purchase of works of art to form a permanent collection (although the city reduced the latter to a commitment of twenty years) and to allow one-third of the City Art Gallery Committee to be Institution members.Footnote 116 The new art museum would also continue the Institution's autumn exhibitions.
The renamed and remodeled Manchester City Art Gallery officially opened with the now municipally run autumn exhibition of works for sale on Friday, 31 August 1883.Footnote 117 Despite the ideals of the men who had initiated the transfer, however, tensions between the use of art to enhance the city's national standing and the ideals of bringing art to the people were readily apparent in its content, organization, and accessibility. This conflict would only become more pronounced in later years; as in Liverpool, the Manchester City Art Gallery's paid-entry exhibitions of works for sale competed with the growth of the free permanent collection for space and resources. Increasing the influence of London artists, to the detriment of locals, the Manchester City Art Gallery sought to obtain the “big names” in the art world to increase the popularity and prestige of their exhibitions; apparently the old wish to remove the stigma of the “myth of Manchester” had not entirely disappeared.Footnote 118 Ironically, perhaps, the members of the old, private Royal Manchester Institution on the City Art Gallery Committee continued to push the city to create an educational museum for all that would incorporate copies of great works, lectures, applied art, and clear labels. With their prodding, the committee did acquire a collection of applied art, portions of which were chosen by William Morris, art reformer Charles Rowley, and painters Frederick Shields and Ford Madox Brown. However, the Manchester City Art Gallery primarily developed as a space for the collection—and annual sale—of popular contemporary painting, and the applied art aimed at the working classes remained in the dark lower galleries year-round, showing the place they held in the priorities of the museum's civic trustees.Footnote 119 Ultimately, the Manchester City Art Gallery could not avoid friction between its stated mission of giving workers access to fine art and craftsmanship and its frequent use as a space of middle-class entertainment and sociability.
CONCLUSIONS
In all three cities, Ruskin's ideas inspired citizens to work to make art available to a broader public. However, local circumstance and personality encouraged different goals, and these differences were only magnified when reformers, city councils, and benefactors tried to put their ideas into action. Birmingham's developing municipal socialism, which emphasized aesthetics as part of the wider mission of “improvement,” placed the art museum in the center of city administration, with free entry to the permanent collection, loan exhibitions, and a collection that emphasized both fine and applied arts. Liverpool's class divisions and parsimonious council forced the art reformers to be creative, ultimately using annual, paid-entry autumn exhibitions of art for sale to raise funds and interest among the city's elites. This strategy, combined with generous private funding, did ultimately give the city an art museum, but it remained encumbered with annual exhibitions that made most of the museum a paid-entry reflection of the city's stratified class structure. Likewise, despite the high ambitions and radical politics of Manchester's art reformers, their use of the Royal Manchester Institution as the basis of the city art museum left the new institution as oriented as Liverpool's toward the city's middle class.
In all three cities, the major advocates of a city art museum connected art, beauty, social justice, labor, and morality in slightly different ways, but all argued that art was a necessity for the improvement and amelioration not simply of the working classes but of industrial society itself. However, as these studies have shown, even similar ideas led to very different results in different local contexts. Horsfall and Rowley were as idealistic as any art reformers anywhere, yet they found that the Manchester City Art Gallery, which they helped to establish as a municipal institution, failed in its duty to provide examples of the best work or to elucidate what it did contain with labels and lectures for the uneducated.Footnote 120 Similarly, in Liverpool, Picton and Rathbone argued that municipal cultural institutions should aim to make the highest possible standard accessible to all classes, but they ended up creating an institution that shut up the free, permanent collection for much of the year.Footnote 121 Following the Ruskinian ideal of the time, and the demands of its skilled workforce, the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery concentrated on applied and industrial art to an extent far beyond Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery or the Manchester City Art Gallery. Yet this very success would become a burden to the Birmingham museum in the twentieth century, as aesthetic standards and ideology changed.
Besides the contradictions of failed good intentions, we can observe another key conflict as these cities put ideas into practice. The art reformers could never have developed these museums on their own; they relied on private benefactors and city councils willing, for a variety of reasons, to put up the money. Art held a peculiar and liminal position such that by building art museums cities could apparently help both themselves and the underprivileged at the same time. While this article has focused on the instigators behind these art museums—the people arguing and working behind the scenes—these idealists were successful only because others supported their projects financially. The art reform movement and the use of art for civic pride could work together to get a museum built, but often these aims conflicted once committees tried to establish collecting, opening, and education policies.Footnote 122 As I have noted, this could even mean the exclusion of the working classes that the art reformers had hoped to reach.
Reformers hoped to open museums on Sundays and in the evenings, provide free entry, label exhibits, collect the “best” fine art available, and offer examples of excellent craftsmanship from around the world (particularly Italy, India, China, and Japan). While the confines of this article do not allow a full exploration of this problem, it is worth emphasizing that continuing disputes about policies on collecting, opening, and education resumed many of the debates over establishing the museums in the first place. What is art for? What kinds of art reach what kinds of audiences? Do certain kinds of art achieve particular social goals? Even as these museums were being founded, their rationale and theoretical foundations were being eroded, and modernism would eventually replace the art reformers’ aesthetic ideology that understood representative art as a universal language. Yet there they still stand, in their original buildings, monuments to a time when city activists hoped that art might mitigate the worst effects of industrial capitalism, and industrial capitalists helped them to put their plans into action. Perhaps most important, these Victorian institutions and the aesthetic ideology that made them possible have left a long shadow. Although modernism and postmodernism have transformed the way we expect art to communicate to different audiences, we still hold lingering associations of art with progress, democracy, and even morality. Governments, corporations, and individual millionaires still build and support art museums as worthy causes; like the Victorians, we still tend to believe that art is good for people and that it should be universally accessible. Unlike our predecessors, however, we do so without really knowing why.
