page_title: Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester 1857
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester 1857 / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Later rendered as an engraving entitled Cottonopolis by Edward Goodall
context_page_description: The Art Treasures of Great Britain was an exhibition of fine art held in Manchester, England, from 5 May to 17 October 1857. It remains the largest art exhibition to be held in the UK, possibly in the world, with over 16,000 works on display. It attracted over 1.3 million visitors in the 142 days it was open, about four times the population of Manchester at that time, many of whom visited on organised railway excursions. Its selection and display of artworks had a formative influence on the public art collections that were then being established in the UK, such as the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
context_section_description: Manchester was a small provincial town in the medieval period, but by 1855 it was an industrial city with 95 cotton mills and 1,724 warehouses. It was visited by French historian Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835, who scathingly wrote:
  A sort of black smoke covers the city ... From this foul drain, the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilise the world.
  Manchester gained city status in 1853, and the exhibition was financed by the city's increasingly affluent business grandees, who were motivated by a desire to demonstrate their cultural attainment, and inspired by the Paris International Exhibition in 1855, the Dublin Exhibition in 1853, and the Great Exhibition in 1851; there had been an "Exposition of British Industrial Art in Manchester" in 1845. Unlike these earlier exhibitions, the Manchester exhibition was restricted to works of art without any industrial or trade items on display.
  The idea for an exhibition in Manchester was first expressed in a letter sent on 10 February 1856 by John Connellan Deane, son of Irish architect Sir Thomas Deane and a commissioner for the 1853 Dublin Exhibition, to Thomas Fairbairn son of Manchester iron founder Sir William Fairbairn and a commissioner for the 1851 Great Exhibition. The concept quickly gained momentum: after an initial meeting on 26 March 1856, a guarantee fund of £74,000 was soon underwritten by around 100 contributors, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert granted their patronage.
  A General Committee established in May 1856, chaired by the Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire Lord Ellesmere (and, after his death in February 1857, by the Lord Overstone), assisted by an Executive Committee chaired by Fairbairn. Deane was appointed as General Commissioner, on an annual salary of £1,000. The committee took artistic advice from German art historian Gustav Waagen, who had published the first 3 volumes of his Treasures of Art in Great Britain in 1854. George Scharf was appointed as the exhibition's Art Secretary; he became secretary and director to the newly founded National Portrait Gallery in 1857.
caption: William Wyld's view of Manchester from Higher Broughton, 1852
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