High culture and tall chimneys

Art institutions and urban society in Lancashire, 1780–1914

James Moore

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526115652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Landschaftsgestaltung

This study follows the development of Lancashire's unique network of art institutions throughout the nineteenth century, exploring the motivations of the artists, patrons, politicians and philanthropists involved.

1
Introduction: art in the first industrial society

The 1857 Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition was a landmark in British cultural life.¹ It marked the emergence of the industrialist and merchant as a key force in the patronage of British art in the same way that the 1832 Reform Act heralded the arrival of that same social class in British politics.² The exhibition was organised by a largely middle-class network of patrons, and many of the most celebrated exhibits came from the homes of those who had made their wealth through trade, finance and industrial production (see Figure 1).³ Yet while studies have been undertaken on the great private collections of these industrial and commercial leaders, less systematic attention has been paid to the contribution they made to the formation of the art institutions that grew up alongside this extensive pattern of private collecting.⁴ Where urban art institutions have received attention, interest has often been focused on capital cities, with one influential essay all but ignoring regional institutions.⁵ Where art historians have taken an interest in the English regions, the focus has often been on the role of voluntary bodies and local corporations as the sponsors of individual artistic projects, such as the famous Ford Madox Brown murals at Manchester's town hall, with less attention paid to the emergence of art institutions and the role they played in the wider cultural economy of industrial centres.⁶ Waterfield's recent national survey was an important landmark but it suffers from a London-centric perspective, contrasting London to what are described as the ‘provinces’ while offering little on the smaller towns, the dynamics of urban processes or questions of regionality.⁷ Hill has made important contributions to our understanding of the class dimensions of late nineteenth-century city art museums, while Woodson-Boulton has highlighted the influence of Ruskinian agendas on major municipal art galleries.⁸ The present study takes a broader perspective, informed by a detailed understanding of the nature of industrial Britain. Rather than seeing art institutions as primarily a late Victorian phenomenon, this book seeks to explore their development from their origins in the late eighteenth century. In particular, it will reject the view that one particular set of cultural ideas ever came to dominate the public art movement. By focusing on the world's ‘first industrial region’, the county of Lancashire and its hinterland, it is possible to develop a more thorough understanding of the roots of these institutions, the new urban elites that created them and the different values that they promoted and celebrated. This detailed regional approach will allow for an understanding of the complex cultural politics surrounding art institutions, the ways in which they were used as a platform for a range of social reform agendas and the reasons why their role came to be questioned in the early twentieth century. This volume will explore art institutions as key elements of the urban public sphere, as agents for social inclusion and, eventually, as cultural democratisation. Although managed largely by a small segment of the urban middle class, art institutions could exercise influence only if they were public bodies, promoting a public purpose. By the 1850s this meant advancing the interests of all classes, through the spread of cultural knowledge and visual literacy. Sometimes this was to be done for narrow instrumental purposes; sometimes a ‘higher’ objective was postulated. Sometimes this was primarily to serve the civic community, sometimes to advance the self-improving aspirations of the individual.

1 Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition: the Main Exhibition Hall at Trafford Park

This is a study of institutions, networks and decisions as much as of art production and display. Understanding how institutions evolved in response to the changing society around them is the focus of this work. The ecological concentrations of population, urbanisation and capital surpluses created by proto-industrialisation were important preconditions for the evolution of cultural institutions, but they do not in themselves provide a sufficiently powerful explanation for why particular types of institutions emerged.⁹ Although middle-class cultural leaders promoted a vision of cultural life that reflected bourgeois and largely liberal values, there was, in practice, a great deal of disagreement about the function and role of art institutions. Sometimes this could reflect the political fissures in the urban middle class.¹⁰ However, the disagreement could reflect more profound differences about the type of cultural education that was required in the modern liberal state, the quality or otherwise of modern British art or the role of modern capitalism in facilitating or undermining cultural production. By the time Edwardian Lancashire had inherited vast public collections of Victorian art, it had begun to question the cultural insularity that had inspired them and even the cultural value of the art galleries in which they were housed.

The growing wealth of Lancashire in the late eighteenth century is the starting point for this study. The early part of the book explores the processes through which private capital was converted into social and public institutions, often building on pre-existing urban networks. Adopting a regional perspective offers a number of advantages over approaches that focus on the locality or nation, especially when one is attempting to assess processes of long-term historical transformation. Most importantly, it provides a useful strategic perspective for understanding how a variety of cultural and geographical identities can be expressed through artistic patronage and production. Gunn has shown how the specificities of locality and region could be expressed by newly emergent cultural practice and how cultural performances reshaped those identities.¹¹ Although London institutions exercised a powerful influence over the national art market, regional art activity, particularly that in Lancashire, did much to shape the taste for modern British paintings – a trend well established by the early Victorian period. Perhaps the most influential British art trader of all, Thomas Agnew and Sons, began business in Lancashire and continued to have strong associations with Liverpool and Manchester throughout the nineteenth century. The advice of Agnews was to shape private collections across Britain and was very influential in the formation of the major municipal art galleries in Manchester, Salford, Liverpool and other towns of the region.¹²

A regional perspective, then, allows for a deeper analysis of the landscape of cultural formations. Since Langton's influential article on the emergence of regional cultures, historians have begun to see industrialisation as a factor in the formation and reformation of distinctive cultural outlooks.¹³ This approach does not deny the importance of national narratives and agendas or the significance of individual taste and personal influences. However, it shows how sub-national cultural communities are formed and helps us to understand how those communities are sustained, whether that be through personal friendships, commercial inter-urban networks, civic projects or new cultural institutions such as art galleries and schools. As this study will illustrate, the growth in support for modern British art, often seen as a ‘national’ movement, was frequently driven by regional art markets and regional art institutions in industrial towns far distant from London. Much of the expansion of this market was due to the surpluses created by industry, with a rising middle class eschewing many of the artistic canons celebrated by the aristocracy for new cultural forms appropriate to their own interests and identities. It was profits from regional industry that allowed for the formation of a genuinely national market, creating new opportunities not only for collectors but also for artists who could often exploit civic and regional networks and loyalties to establish remunerative careers. These loyalties were complex and often overlapped, sometimes stretching overseas. Lancashire was the first industrial region and a key hub in a global economic network. Its worldwide commercial networks eventually provided new international dimensions to its regional identity and, unsurprisingly, its cultural life.¹⁴

While the networks of collectors stretched across the world, civic and regional networks provided the immediate framework for a stable and predictable art market. Early nineteenth-century collectors such as William Roscoe, William Hardman, Henry McConnel and Thomas Agnew often drew upon their local civic networks among the emerging middle-class citizenry to institutionalise the practices of art collecting and appreciation within the region and their own cities. Art museums, galleries, academies and schools were the mechanisms for bringing new cultural groupings together, establishing practices of cultural display and exchange and, ultim...