Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (30 page)

Few of Liverpool's citizens had ever before seen this kind of display; they marvelled at the exotic, the far-away and the historic now all within reach. Mayer's idiosyncratic and unpredictable approach to collecting was amusing and spectacular, a stimulus to the imaginations of adults and children alike. Locals quickly added the museum to their list of entertainments, and many made return visits. Even in his own museum Mayer lacked the confidence to speak directly to visitors or answer queries about the collection, and the curator was kept busy explaining the displays and acting as tour guide for those unfamiliar with the town.

At a time when the distinctions between private and public collections could be hazy, Mayer's museum straddled the border between the two. Although there was an admission charge of one shilling for adults and sixpence for children (which Mayer regretted having to impose), the museum was genuinely accessible, useful and popular. It was created with the general visitor in mind, as much to entertain as to educate. While many museums – from the South Kensington Museum to Ruskin's educational experiment in Sheffield – were forthright in their didactic ambition, Mayer seems simply to have enjoyed the idea that people might like to come to see his things. Certainly, it seems clear that he regarded the Egyptian Museum as largely ‘public', as an enterprise for the town of Liverpool that just happened to be funded by his personal wealth and made possible by his personal obsession.

With his museum open, Mayer felt an increased belief in himself as a collector. He commissioned a third portrait from John Harris, a competent local craftsman without pretensions. It is imposing and substantial. Mayer stands at the heart of his museum and replacing the eccentric clutter of his first portrait are a few choice objects: a colossal statue from the Abu Simbel temples, one of ancient Egypt's richest and most haunting sites; a rare thirteenth-century German prayerbook in an intricate medieval binding; and a beautiful ancient carved ivory, the Asclepius-Hygieia diptych, which had graced a Roman site of worship and been part of the Fejérváry collection. Behind him, retreating into the arcaded spaced beyond, can be seen the forms of his cases; under his hand the gilt-edged top of a heavily carved scholar's table and at the front of the picture, bold and large this time, both distinct from his objects and master of them, the figure of Mayer himself, half-smiling at his visitors, welcoming them to the museum he had created with an open, confident sweep of the hand.

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.'
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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 particular, readily committed their support and the organizers emphasized the choice of Manchester as a venue. ‘Situated as it is, in the centre
of the kingdom, in the midst of a dense surrounding population with railway facilities admirably adapted for bringing and returning visitors within one day', the city boasted both practical advantages ‘calculated to ensure the financial success of the scheme' and, just as significantly, a tradition of active collecting and art appreciation: it was, pointed out proud local dignitaries, ‘a district where individuals have done so much to encourage art'.
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In just fourteen months, the committee succeeded in building an enormous palace on land at Old Trafford leased from the Manchester Cricket Club and later converted into the city's botanical gardens. They filled the cavernous spaces, hanging paintings three or four high on the walls, installing cases with ceramics and glassware and creating corridors of sculpture in the airy nave. Over the entrance was a quotation from Keats – ‘a thing of Beauty is a joy for ever' – and over the exit a line of Pope's, ‘to wake the soul by tender strokes of art'. These set the tone for the exhibition. There were over 6,000 paintings, both by respected English artists such as Hogarth, Gainsborough and Constable and by the European Old Masters – Rubens, Raphael, Titian and Rembrandt. ‘Modern' works by Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites were included, and the emerging art of photography was represented by evocative images of the Crimean War by James Robertson and an ambitious allegoric montage of
The Two Ways of Life
by the Swedish photographic pioneer Oscar Gustave Rejlander. The hall was subdivided by partitions, creating separate galleries, each shaded with calico to prevent damage to the artworks on sunny days. When things inside got too hot, firemen sprayed water on to the roof in a rudimentary form of air conditioning. Two public refreshment rooms also helped to reinvigorate visitors: in the convivial surroundings of the second-class restaurant, one reviewer noted that ‘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'.
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Pride of place in the Old Trafford palace was given to the impressive collection of medieval and Renaissance decorative arts brought together in the 1830s and 1840s by the Toulouse lawyer Jules Soulages. It was a collection J. C. Robinson had already seen and admired. In 1855, when it had come on to the market after Soulages' death, a photographer had been sent by Henry Cole to France to record the objects, with a view to making a purchase. His photographs showed a Toulouse townhouse bursting with vases and platters, highly decorated chests, carved chairs, tables and mirrors, and elaborate fireplaces. It was clearly a unique and valuable collection, and, with the support of Prince Albert, Cole began arrangements to buy everything, in the meantime bringing the objects to England for temporary display in the Marlborough House galleries. There, Robinson began the meticulous task of cataloguing, producing an illustrated descriptive inventory for publication in December 1856, just as plans for the Art Treasures Exhibition were taking shape.

But the sale was not completed. The Prime Minister at the time, Viscount Palmerston, and the Treasury could not see what Cole and Robinson wanted with Soulages' rare and historic objects, nor how they could be used to educate designers and artisans. Once again, there was a debate about the purpose of the South Kensington Museum and the types of objects it should be collecting. Finally, emphasizing the principle of utility, the expenditure was vetoed. Instead, it was the organizers of the Manchester spectacle who audaciously agreed to pay the £13,500 needed to secure the collection for Britain. Robinson was forced to repack all the objects and the Soulages pieces left Marlborough House for Old Trafford, where they formed the core of the Art Treasures show. ‘After repeated communications with the London managers which failed to secure its loan, the members of the Executive Committee, in their individual capacity and on their personal responsibility, agreed to purchase the Collection. . . and
thus secured it,' explained the committee.
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Manchester had scored a victory over the capital, and let it be fully known in the press. Numerous announcements and illustrations drew the northern crowds to see what it was that had been snatched from London's hands.

Lacking a formal organization like the Fine Arts Club to oversee the event, Manchester relied instead on bringing together an ad-hoc general council specifically for the duration of the project. This included the usual selection of gentry, MPs, wealthy merchants and municipal dignitaries. A few were also members of the London-based Fine Arts Club, such as Lord Overstone, but many more were attracted by the opportunity to make a local contribution. James Aspinall Turner, for example, was a Manchester cotton manufacturer, Whig MP and naturalist, who owned a scholarly collection of entomological specimens; Stockport-born Joseph Whitworth was a mechanical engineer who invented an hexagonal, high-performance rifle in 1859 and who left a number of bequests to the city of Manchester, including the core collection of the Whitworth Art Gallery; Thomas Goadsby, mayor of Manchester from 1861 to 1862, presented an imposing memorial of Prince Albert to the city in ‘grateful acknowledgement of public and private virtues'; Sir Humphrey de Trafford held nearly 2,000 acres of land in Cheshire and was to become an implacable opponent of the building of the Manchester Ship Canal in the 1880s – it was his agreement to give over the lease of the Old Trafford land at favourable terms which made the exhibition possible.

While it was largely drawn from, and committed to, the area, the organizing committee was in no way parochial. It expressed ambitious hopes for the exhibition, setting it in a national context that went beyond ‘the mere gratification of public curiosity, and the giving [of ] an intellectual entertainment to the dense population of a particular locality'. As Prince Albert suggested in
a letter lending his support to the project, such an intention might well be ‘praiseworthy in itself ' but the show could accomplish so much more: ‘National usefulness', enthused the Prince, ‘might be found in the educational direction which may be given to the whole scheme. . . If the collection you propose to form were made to illustrate the history of Art in a chronological and systematic arrangement, it would speak powerfully to the public mind, and enable, in a practical way, the most uneducated eye to gather the lessons which ages of thought and scientific research have attempted to abstract.' Such an achievement, Prince Albert went on, would have not just national, but also international impact, showing off Britain to the world and creating ‘for the first time a gallery as no other country could produce'.
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The Manchester organizers decided to follow the Prince's advice, and the show was the first large-scale exhibition in Europe to present works chronologically in an attempt to reveal the historical development of art. More usually, art was displayed by theme, or by prominent schools. Here in Manchester, works from northern Europe, for example, were hung opposite artworks of the same period from southern Europe in order to highlight differences in style and technique. The conventional accepted hierarchies were set aside, so that equal emphasis was given to Italian, Spanish, Dutch and German painters. And, as the Prince had suggested, this approach was to prove influential beyond the immediate life of the exhibition. At a time when national museums were struggling to make their displays meaningful, the Art Treasures show became associated with some of the most forward-thinking curatorial practices in Europe. It came to be lauded as a model of ‘teaching the mind as well as gratifying the senses', and discussions about the principles of display at the National Gallery, in particular, frequently referred to what was regarded as Manchester's great success.
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‘Each work of Art appears as a link in a great chain, which receives an influence from the one preceding
it, and imparts an influence to the one following,' explained Gustav Waagen admiringly in the exhibition catalogue. ‘Each work is thus illustrated and made intelligible, while instruction is combined with enjoyment.'
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Gradually, the example of the Art Treasures exhibition began to make itself felt in permanent displays across the country. When George Scharf was appointed Secretary of the newly founded National Portrait Gallery in London in the year of the Art Treasures Exhibition, he took with him the experience he had gained as art secretary of the Manchester show and the principles espoused there, and continued to uphold the value of chronological display and clear interpretation. In this way, he set in train the development, on a national scale, of new ways of displaying art inspired by the 1857 event.