The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857: Entrepreneurs, Connoisseurs and the Public (review)

Elizabeth A. Pergam’s masterly study of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition makes two important and distinct scholarly contributions. First, the book carries out a meticulous historical analysis of a landmark exhibition. Second, it claims to expose the origins of some assumptions embedded in today’s art history. This volume offers a much needed in-depth account of the genesis, planning, implementation, organization, and contemporary reception of the Exhibition, but its major intervention is its assessment of the event’s legacies; this in turn leads to broader conclusions about the impact of exhibitions on the discipline of art history.

The volume attempts to insert the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 into the canon of historically significant exhibitions that has begun to be established over the last few decades. As the author notes, by bringing an exhibition from the north of England to center stage, the book counters the bias in the existing literature toward France and, when Britain has appeared, London. Pergam argues that the Art Treasures Exhibition represents a critical moment in the history of exhibitions and that many of the issues facing the museum world today were grappled with by its organizers. For example, she demonstrates that the Exhibition raised questions about the tension between private ownership and public display, the conflicting priorities of lenders and visitors, the competing demands of pedagogy and aesthetics, the compatibility of commerce and culture, and the desirability (or otherwise) of the “blockbuster loan exhibition” (216). Pergam’s analysis shows that our understanding of the history of exhibitions and museums is incomplete without the Art Treasures Exhibition. She suggests, for example, that the Exhibition was instrumental in creating the role of the curator. The history of art in the Victorian period, which saw an explosion of new exhibition venues and innovative display strategies, cannot be separated from the history of exhibitions, and this book weaves the Art Treasures Exhibition into that history.

Another field with which the book engages is “history of collecting” (217), which, the author argues, is well established in Europe but not in the United States (though she sees the recent foundation of the Frick Center for the History of Collecting as a promising sign of growing interest in this area). Having carried out extensive research into the destination of paintings from the Art Treasures Exhibition, Pergam shows that inclusion in the Exhibition increased a work’s market value. The final chapter investigates the Exhibition’s impact on taste, showing that the event prompted a new appreciation for early Renaissance painting that manifests in the contents of American public collections.

This is a fine book, and its contribution to these two fields—the history of exhibitions and the history of collecting—is undoubtable. Yet a challenge faced by both fields is how to bring conclusions about exhibitions and collecting to bear on works of art: how can the business of analyzing and interpreting individual works (and groups of works) benefit from such investigations? The volume contains little visual analysis, and reproductions of exhibits serve mainly to illustrate discussions of attribution. The question the book poses for future scholars is how to take the material presented here, together with Pergam’s insightful conclusions about the history of exhibitions and collections, and consider its significance with respect to the objects themselves.

Unsurprisingly, given that this project originated in a doctoral dissertation, the book displays evidence of painstaking archival research. It presents an extraordinary amount of data—sophisticatedly synthesized and of immense value to the specialist—that the general reader may find obscures the broader themes the author aims to address. The helpful index allows the reader to navigate the material easily, and the book contains useful diagrams, annotated illustrations, and appendices to be mined further by future scholars.

As the first book-length study of the Art Treasures Exhibition, this book lays the foundations for new work. The author’s primary concern, particularly...