Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves by Jacqueline Yallop

Author:Jacqueline Yallop
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd
Published: 2011-11-12T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Treasures of the North

F ive years after opening his museum, Joseph Mayer found himself standing in a crowded field under a hot May sun, choking in the dust of passing horses and staring with slightly dismayed wonder at a vast vaulted iron and glass building whose low wings seemed to stretch far into the distance. He was with a group of his Liverpool friends. They had travelled together by train the few miles to Old Trafford, just outside Manchester, where, in the heart of the industrial grime and pragmatism of England’s north-west, they were about to join the snaking queue to see an unprecedented event. Larger and more impressive even than the famous Great Exhibition, this was Manchester’s Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857. Here, 16,000 works of art were collected under one roof: oils, watercolours, engravings and drawings; the controversial and avant-garde work of the Pre-Raphaelites; Michelangelo’s unfinished ‘Manchester Madonna’; photographs, textiles, sculpture, armour, furniture – and Joseph Mayer’s choicest and most precious pieces.

Like Robinson’s South Kensington exhibition a few years later, the 1857 Manchester display drew on the generosity of, and was an inspiration to, private collectors. ‘Art in England may be said to have derived all its encouragement from private persons,’ explained the organizers. Articulating the tension between private ownership and public display, they went on: ‘The pictures of our leading artists, the work of our best Sculptors, as well as the most select of all other objects coming under the denomination of Fine Arts, are distributed in private houses throughout the kingdom, instead of being found as in Continental Countries in National Collections accessible to the public.’ Like the 1862 show designed by Robinson and the Fine Arts Club, the purpose of the Art Treasures Exhibition was to display the finest of these works, to celebrate the achievements of private collectors, and to go some way towards redressing the balance from ‘periodic gatherings of the production of industry’ to exhibitions of more aesthetic interest: ‘There appears no reason why an effort should not be made to collect together in one central locality, and in a suitable building, the Treasures of Art with which Great Britain abounds.’1

Everyone, it seemed, was eager to be involved. As for the later London show, the Queen and Prince Albert agreed to lend a number of pieces and, keen to be included in such exalted company, collectors from across the country hurried forward to make their possessions available. Members of the Fine Arts Club were asked to lend, and Charlotte Schreiber offered three paintings by the Welsh watercolourist Penry Williams to the section of ‘Modern Masters’. But this was to be a regional showcase as much as a national event. It was a chance to polish provincial pride and highlight what could be done by the townsmen of the North; an opportunity for men like Mayer to prove that, even in the regions, there were collectors with taste and refinement whose objects rivalled the best in the world. Local collectors, in

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