Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves

by Jacqueline Yallop

  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’.5

  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.6 ‘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.’7 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.

  Most visitors to the Art Treasures Exhibition, of course, were more concerned with enjoying themselves and seeing a fine spectacle than considering the event’s effect on museum policy. And in this too it did not disappoint. On 5 May 1857, Prince Albert opened the show. Season tickets were sold in advance for one guinea; a two-guinea ticket included admission to both the opening and the official visit of Queen Victoria on 29 June. On most days, admission was charged at 1 shilling, although, on Thursdays and for the first ten days of the show, the price was set at half a crown. By the time the doors closed in the middle of October, over 1 million people had passed through the turnstiles. These visitors included European royalty, the politicians Disraeli, Gladstone, Lord Palmerston and the Duke of Wellington, the writers Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Gaskell and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and critics such as Gustav Waagen and John Ruskin. The Schreibers visited the show on five consecutive days.

  Many of the visitors had never before seen any works of art, and certainly had never seen so many gathered together in one place. This was a show to delight ordinary visitors as much as to impress eminent ones. As the organizers had predicted, railways were the key to getting masses of working people to the site: excursions by train were laid on not only from the north-west but from as far afield as Shrewsbury, Leeds, Grimsby and Lincoln. Titus Salt, the Bradford manufacturer and philanthropist, commissioned three trains to take nearly 3,000 of his factory workers to see the exhibition in September, while Thomas Cook, who had arranged trips to both the Great Exhibition in 1851 and the 1855 Paris Exhibition, this time advertised romantic ‘moonlight’ excursions that arrived in Manchester at dawn.

  Such enthusiasm did not convince everyone that the exhibition was a worthwhile venture, however. For those who knew Manchester as a blackened industrial hub of factories and mills, it seemed an incongruous place to show art. Hawthorne, who visited the displays many times, commented that ‘it is singular that the great Art-Exhibition should have come to pass in the rudest great town in England’.8 More antagonistically, the Duke of Devonshire, whose Chatsworth estates lay on the other side of the Pennines and who refused to lend to the show, was sharply dismissive of Manchester’s right to an event of any cultural significance: ‘What in the world do you want with art in Manchester?’ he demanded. ‘Why can’t you stick to your cotton spinning?’9 The Duke was a collector himself, with a particular taste for illustrated botanical books, and he was not without philanthropic impulses: he donated land for public gardens in Buxton and endowed the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, where he was Chancellor of the University for thirty years from 1861. But his apparent belief that art did not belong among the lower classes highlights the continuing reluctance of many of the country’s wealthiest and most powerful men to countenance any change to the established systems for showing and viewing art. It reveals the lingering fear that accessible events like the Art Treasures Exhibition, and the public museums they inspired, might in the end encourage unrest and distract workers from the essential business of their ‘cotton spinning’. Cavendish recognized that, by taking works out of their more usual context of aristocratic privilege and placing them on open display, the Manchester spectacle was doing something potentially subversive. It was asking private collectors to share the treasures they and their families had amassed over the centuries with the rest of the nation – and not just the genteel part of it.

  The Art Treasures Exhibition was a particular triumph for Joseph Mayer. His objects were a celebrated part of the display. He had already played a public role on other notable occasions: he designed the silver trowel with which Sir Philip Egerton, MP, laid the foundation stone for Birkenhead docks in October 1844 and the prize plate for the Royal Mersey Yacht Club. As we have seen, his pieces were well received at the Gr
eat Exhibition. Now, at this latest spectacle, he found his collection widely honoured and admired. Scholars asked for information and photographs, and even Gustav Waagen spoke ‘of the importance of your great collection’.10 The review volume that accompanied the exhibition carried illustrations of all of Mayer’s pieces along with a description of one of his Wedgwood vases as ‘an artistic treasure’, an indication that Wedgwood was becoming noticed and valued. It also cited eleven of Mayer’s pieces as among the finest examples of ceramic art.11 In the galleries, a selection of his late antique and Byzantine ivories were laid out chronologically in two cabinets to display the history of European sculpture from the classical period through to the Renaissance, and his collection was praised for its exceptional quality: ‘There is an excellent opportunity to make a perfect study of sculpture in monuments of small scale,’ suggested Waagen, for example, in his commentary on the displays. ‘To do so it is advisable to begin with the many fine antique sculptures in bronze and terracotta from the collection of Mr Hertz, now belonging to Mr Joseph Mayer in Liverpool.’12

  One piece that attracted particular attention was an almost lifesize bronze statue of the Buddhist goddess of compassion, Guanyin. Another looted treasure, the statue had been taken from the pilgrimage island of Putuo, east of Ningbo near Shanghai in China, by Major William Edie, an officer in the British army during the First Opium War (1839–42). Made during the fifteenth century, it showed the contemplative goddess with twenty-two outstretched arms seated on a carved pedestal. Mayer had acquired it, along with four other devotional statues from Putuo, as part of the Bram Hertz collection. While he was waiting for the statues to be sold at Sotheby’s, Mayer displayed the pieces in Manchester, no doubt aware that such publicity would do no harm in raising their profile and boosting his standing as a collector.

  With such a showcase, Mayer’s reputation continued to grow, within the region and beyond. The museum in Colquitt Street flourished. In 1862, it became a ‘Museum of Antiquities’, perhaps to emphasize the increasing range of the objects on display, and five years later it was renamed again as the ‘Museum of National and Foreign Antiquities’, leaving no doubt as to its breadth and ambition. The experiment of an accessible museum had clearly been proved a success, and in 1860, embracing the growing fashion for public museums, Liverpool Town Council opened a splendid purpose-built building with money and land provided by William Brown, a merchant, banker and politician. The neo-classical style of the new building was typical of the emerging Victorian museums. It was grand and imposing, a statement of municipal order, and it also recalled art of the classical period, still regarded as the standard by which all other art was judged. Just as the British Museum concentrated much of its energies and resources on collecting artefacts of the classical civilizations, so the architectural presence of these new museums suggested that they, too, would be displaying equally prestigious objects. Preston, Sheffield, Norwich, Cambridge and Manchester all raised new neo-classical buildings to house their municipal collections and act as temples to the arts. Elsewhere in Europe, neo-classicism was also the style of choice for new museums. In the 1780s, the Prado in Madrid was built to a neoclassical design by Juan de Villanueva; the Altes Museum in Berlin was designed in the same manner by Karl Friedrich Schinkel during the 1820s, using the Stoa in Athens as a model; and the New Hermitage in St Petersburg, designed by the German architect Leo von Klenze, combined elements of the classical, Renaissance and Baroque, all interpreted in a neo-classical style.

  At first, the displays in the imposing new Liverpool building consisted almost entirely of natural history specimens, bequeathed from the collection of the 13th Earl of Derby, but, as elsewhere, private collectors soon began to make an increasing diversity of objects available through loans or legacies. In 1867, Mayer decided that the museum was the proper home for the 14,000 pieces of his collection. Roach Smith tried to persuade him that the town was unworthy of anything so splendid: ‘There are certain classes to whom the gift of food is nothing, unless at the same time you chew it for them,’ he fretted. ‘You will find the Liverpool Citizens. . . of this class. Gratitude nor appreciation can never possibly spring from them. . . There are higher and better regions for you.’13 But Mayer, for once, did not listen. He had made up his mind. Of course, he knew that the galleries of the British Museum were splendid; he had walked the corridors of South Kensington’s Brompton Boilers and had admired the displays there. But he was closer to local collectors, curators and scholars and shared their regional pride. He had no desire for his collection to be scattered across the shelves of a large institution. And so Mayer wrote to the Liverpool authorities, offering his museum to the town, so long as they promised ‘that the Collection shall be kept together and be known as and called “The Mayer Collection”’.14

  When his offer was accepted, it seemed as though his future in Liverpool was secured, his reputation and his local roots honoured. ‘Your museum has been nobly given and has most deservedly earned you a niche in the temple of Fame,’ Joseph Clarke assured him. ‘Your name will float down the stream of time.’15 Some of the more idiosyncratic pieces were set aside by the municipal curators but much of Joseph Mayer’s jumble of objects was duly catalogued and displayed, while the Egyptian pieces in particular formed the nucleus of the new, genuinely public, collection that made the Liverpool Museum known across the world, in Mayer’s lifetime and today.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A Larger World

  J oseph Mayer had decided it was time to move. With his ambitious collecting, the rooms above his shop were becoming increasingly cramped, overwhelmed by objects, books and papers. But there was also a new belief that he was worthy to take his place among the scholars he so admired. It was time for something grander than a shopkeeper’s existence. So in the late 1850s Mayer took a proper house, one of substance and even grandeur, at Dacre Park on the Rock Ferry escarpment, looking across the Mersey from Cheshire to Liverpool. The guise of the country gentleman suited him – and his collecting – so well that just a couple of years later, in 1860, he moved a mile or so south to Bebington, where he established himself in a solid brick-built double-fronted farmhouse with gardens sweeping into open land, the potential for expansion and room for even the most vigorous of collectors and his possessions.

  As with his museum, Mayer wanted a name for the house that would inspire, and he called it Pennant House after Thomas Pennant, the eighteenth-century traveller, antiquary, topographer and naturalist. Pennant was an amiable and progressive country squire, erudite, inquisitive, eloquent and fascinated by history. Born in 1726 at Downing Hall in Flintshire, he wrote on subjects as diverse as earthquakes and the history of quadrupeds, but it was his remarkably popular series of travel books, beginning with A Tour in Scotland in 1769, and including accounts of Wales, Snowdon, and a Journey from Chester to London, which came to be seen as important records of antiquarian relics. His correspondence with Gilbert White formed the basis for White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. In taking his name for the Bebington farmhouse, Mayer was setting out a vision for his own future. Just as the ‘Egyptian Museum’ had captured the mystery and romance of the past, so Pennant House promised dignity, refinement and far-reaching scholarship.

  In his new home, Mayer surrounded himself with light and bustle and company. He invited his unmarried sister Jane to move in with him as well as their niece Mary Wordley. Two of his nephews, Frederick and Henry Boyle, lived close by; Mayer opened his doors to them, enjoying the commotion of having young men in the house. He took to gardening, and his collecting instincts found a new outlet in rare plants, often fragile and fickle in the northern cold. He held dinners for his friends, entertaining with enthusiasm, and he talked earnestly to local residents, eager to find out what interested them. He was energetic and inventive, boyish even. He should have been happy, but there was something or, more properly, someone missing. There was a place in the house that could not be filled by nephews and nieces, or even
by the most sympathetic of friends.

  Mayer had never married. He had invested his time, energy and money in his business, and in his collection. But he enjoyed female company and, while he had resisted the best efforts of the Liverpool matrons to fix him up, he had been happy enough to chatter and flirt and dance with their daughters. He was approachable and friendly and he had an eye for the beautiful, the quirky and the rare. While he may have escaped the demands of marriage, however, he could not elude the complications of love. There had been Peggy Harrison. When Mayer came to commission from the Italian sculptor Giovanni Fontana a series of marble reliefs and busts of his friends, it was Peggy who was one of the first to sit for him. The sculpture, Mayer said, would stand as a lasting commemoration to the ‘elegant manners, cultivated taste and affectionate friendship’, which made Peggy ‘a delightful companion in my pilgrimages to shrines of art and antiquities in many lands’.1

  Very little is known about Peggy Harrison, or her exact relationship with Mayer. She certainly travelled abroad with him extensively, and the marble bust is a clear sign of his admiration and respect. Perhaps it was also a way of making amends. In an age with strict rules of propriety, Peggy may well have expected a proposal of marriage. A woman who travelled with a man to whom she was not married, who accompanied him to archaeological sites and along tangled streets of antique dealers, who studied sales catalogues in cold hotel rooms and who entertained, amused and comforted her companion on long journeys, risked a great deal – presumably for love. There is obvious intimacy in Mayer’s evocation of ‘a delightful companion’ who had travelled so far and for so long with him, and there is clear admiration in his assessment of her manners and character. For a connoisseur like Mayer, too, his judgement of Peggy’s ‘cultivated taste’ signals the highest praise. But perhaps she was too independent to submit to married life with a man like Mayer, or perhaps she was not quite what he was looking for. However it was, their relationship was never formalized, and eventually faltered. By the time Mayer had settled himself into Pennant House, their intimate companionship had somehow come to an end.