page_title: Art of Birmingham
section_title: Institutional development
hierarchical_section_title: Art of Birmingham / Painting, drawing and printmaking / Institutional development
caption_attribution_description: English: Allegory of Science and Wisdom (1798), oil on canvas, by James Millar
context_page_description: Birmingham has a distinctive culture of art and design that emerged in the 1750s, driven by the historic importance of the applied arts to the city's manufacturing economy. While other early industrial towns such as Manchester and Bradford were based on the manufacture of bulk commodities such as cotton and wool, Birmingham's economy from the 18th century onwards was built on the production of finished manufactured goods for European luxury markets. The sale of these products was dependent on high-quality design, and this resulted in the early growth of an extensive infrastructure for the education of artists and designers and for exhibiting their works, and placed Birmingham at the heart of debate about the role of the visual arts in the emerging industrial society.
  The city's history in the fine arts also betrays this influence, with many of Birmingham's most notable artistic figures coming from a commercial or craft background.
context_section_description: Artistic activity in late Georgian Birmingham was not restricted to landscape painting. A century later the London-based Magazine of Art could describe Birmingham as "perhaps the most artistic town in England", and the changes that would result in this transformation had already started by the 1780s. A local trade directory of 1785 lists twenty four professional artists, including the portraitist James Millar, the still life painter Moses Haughton and the portrait miniature painter James Bisset. Of widest influence was the Birmingham School of engravers – a separate group to the landscape artists but emerging similarly from the drawing academies of Joseph Barber, Vincent Barber and Samuel Lines. Formed around the younger Barber's pupils William Radclyffe, James Tibbitts Willmore and John Pye, and Lines' pupil William Wyon, this group were to dominate high-quality European printmaking in the 1850s and 1860s and revolutionise the art of book illustration, bringing contemporary art to a much wider public than ever before.
  The first decades of the 19th century saw the gradual development of the institutions that would come to dominate the artistic life of Victorian Birmingham. In 1809 a group of eight artists including Samuel Lines, Charles Barber and Vincent Barber opened an academy of life drawing in Peck Lane, now the site of New Street railway station. This held its first exhibition of members' work in 1814 as the Birmingham Academy of Arts, and was refounded as the Birmingham Society of Arts under the patronage of wealthy local businessmen in 1821.
  The society was dogged by continual tension between its two roles: to its members the society was primarily for promoting Birmingham's artists and exhibiting their work, but to its wealthy patrons its importance was more as a training ground for designers needed for the town's manufacturing industries. This gave rise to a temporary split in 1821 over the patrons' decision to hold an exhibition of old masters instead of members' works. A second, permanent, split took place in 1842, the patrons forming the Society of Arts and Government School of Design - later the Birmingham School of Art - while the artists formed the separate Birmingham Society of Artists, which received royal patronage in 1868 as the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists.
  By the 1820s Birmingham was supporting a vigorous market for contemporary art. While most British towns other than London relied on booksellers and carvers-and-gilders for the sale of pictures, Birmingham had specialist art dealers such as Allen Everitt – whose Artists' Repository and Exhibition of Pictures in Union Street opened in 1811 and which held regular exhibitions from 1817  – and Jones' Pantechnetheca in New Street, which opened in 1824 and where the walls of the picture gallery were "hung with a succession of paintings by the most able ancient and modern masters". An 1819 letter to the painter John Constable remarked that "we have picture sellers everywhere in Birmingham".
  Birmingham was also an important centre for Victorian art patronage, as the home of major collectors such as Joseph Gillott, Edwin Sharp and William Bullock. Gillott in particular had one of the largest and most important collections of the day. An early patron of Turner, he lay at the centre of a nationwide network of dealers, collectors and artists.
  With this growth in Birmingham's artistic organisation came a more established artistic community. Birmingham had had only four professional artists in 1800, but by 1827 the overwhelming majority of the 67 local exhibitors at that year's Society of Arts exhibition were earning their living from the arts, as portraitists, miniaturists, engravers, or painters of still life or landscape. Helen Allingham was the first of a notable series of woman artists to study at the School of Art from the 1850s, that later featured Florence Camm, Kate Bunce and Georgie Gaskin.
  The most prominent members of a generation of young painters from the School of Art were elected as the Society of Artists' first associates in the 1860s, inc
caption: James Millar, Allegory of Science and Wisdom (1798), depicting the values of the Midlands Enlightenment in the shadow of the tower of Birmingham's St. Philip's Church
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