Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (6 page)

The new museums were, as we have seen at South Kensington, a way of making concrete philosophical discussions about art and culture. Throughout Europe, there was a drive to develop museums, as politicians, reformers and critics each attempted to prove their point. In Germany, especially, there was a concerted campaign to establish collections in the major cities. For Gustav Waagen, this was ‘to advance the spiritual education of the nation through the experience of beauty', but for many of his colleagues the emphasis was on education: ‘systematically arranged collections should be for the instruction of the
Volk
and the advancement of scholarly work', maintained Hermann Grimm, another high-profile German art historian.
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In France, still rebuilding after the Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, the focus was also on creating resources for public instruction, and during the 1860s the displays at the Louvre were redesigned to accommodate increased labelling, explanatory materials and guidebooks, further emphasizing its distance from the exclusive habits of its royal past.

This didactic impulse was part of the ongoing desire to make art generally more accessible, and to include all classes in a richer cultural life. A state museum opened in Berlin, for example, as early as 1830, with the intention of creating an opportunity for ‘the general public' to experience art ‘without regard to social status or education'.
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But this kind of rhetoric tended to mask other, more complex, underlying factors. In Britain, the impulse to educate the masses, and to use museums as a tool for education, was, as Ruskin had asserted, also about changing behaviour. As early as 1834, a government select committee established to investigate ‘vices of intoxication among the labouring classes' recommended museums as one solution to public drunkenness.
And in the wake of the 1832 Representation of the People Act, commonly known as the Reform Act – with the 1867 Reform Act further extending the franchise to the urban working class – establishment discomfort about the widening of the right to vote provided another impetus to develop museums. If people were going to be allowed to vote, then they needed to be instructed in the ‘right' things, and the choice and arrangement of collections provided one way of moulding attitudes. The emerging museums grew out of a desire for moral authority and universal order as much as from pedagogic fervour or a commitment to beauty. They were a way of organizing people, enforcing norms of behaviour and driving home approved messages.

By the Victorian mid-century, there was a growing middleclass fear that increasing leisure time would, undirected, encourage the working classes to crime. In 1860, the opening of Manchester's free libraries, for example, was heralded by
Chambers Journal
as an effective solution for preventing unrest: ‘As it is almost certain that the progress of civilization will produce more and more leisure to the human race,' it explained, ‘it becomes a subject of the first importance to provide means for occupying that leisure in moral and intellectual progress.'
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Museums fitted the bill as neatly as libraries. In his 1862 manifesto for a national museum of natural history, Robert Owen, industrialist and reformer, argued that the development of more museums could effectively counter revolutionary impulses, while the opening of the Nottingham Museum in 1872 was lauded for its wholesome and regulatory effect. It was, claimed
The Builder
, ‘an important addition to the educational and refining influences. . . by the means by which those who labour may be lifted upward and at least deprived of their present excuse for merely sensual enjoyments', a respectable alternative to ‘the gin-palace and drinking-saloon. . . in which elevation, not degradation, shall result'.
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The philanthropic impulse to provide for ‘those who labour' was always complicated. It tended to submerge questions about power and status, and to fudge issues of common access and exclusivity. This was particularly true of the creation of smaller collections by well-meaning individuals which occupied a grey area between the public and private. They were often established specifically with public access in mind. Visitors – in particular, the working classes – were given generous admittance and were often allowed a much more intimate relationship to the objects than in the larger museums. But the objects still belonged to the private collector and, harking back to the
Wunderkammer
tradition of the past, the rooms of marvels were clearly stamped with his character. Although some of these collections in time became the foundation of more genuinely public museums, at the outset they showed how private and public collecting were still in the process of divergence during the nineteenth century, leaving plenty of room for confusion.

In many cases, these collections existed entirely for their benefit to the visitor: the collector's pleasure was in the wider good the objects bestowed, rather than in the objects themselves. An interesting example of this was John Ruskin's experimental collection which he installed in a small cottage museum in Sheffield in 1875. He chose Sheffield as the archetypal industrial city, with a tradition of craftsmanship but with many poor working-class citizens who might benefit from education and cultural enlightenment. Always vociferous in public debates about art, Ruskin's views often seemed inconsistent: as a collector and critic he espoused the spiritual value of beautiful works, championing the paintings of J. M. W. Turner, for example, but as a social reformer he also firmly believed in the more utilitarian processes of copying, drawing and close observation as a way of improving the life and work of the country's artisans. He intended the Sheffield museum to be the first of a series of similar teaching
collections nationwide (the others never materialized), offering carefully chosen works for study, from prints, drawings and paintings to mineral specimens and coins. Ruskin oversaw the way in which things were displayed with a clear view to making the works as approachable as possible. Visitors were allowed to draw from, or handle, artefacts and the curator was requested by Ruskin to ‘put everything away but what people can see clearly'.
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Admission was free and, in an attempt to make the collection of genuine use to the working men of the city, the building was open until 9 at night and, unusually, from 2 until 6 on Sunday afternoons, as well as by appointment.

The model worked. Entries in the visitor book show that around two-thirds of the visitors were local, representing almost every district in Sheffield including those deep in the heart of the industrial centre and East End where the metal trades and heavy industries were concentrated. Several visitors became regular, suggesting a programme of study, and several identified themselves as ‘art metal worker'. There was also a stream of female visitors from a range of social classes, from Lady Cunliffe-Owen and her daughter to the illiterate Mary Newbold of Spital Hill and Mrs Hobson of Pitsmoor, who both signed with crosses alongside the curator's entry of their name.

The pattern was repeated across the country. The tension between genuinely egalitarian public opening and inherent systemic inequalities may have remained, but museums proved enormously popular on a practical level. Whatever their philosophical basis, a trip to the local museum became fashionable for people from all walks of life. Museums were pleasant places to be, and the collections offered a novel brand of entertainment. The crowds poured in. In Sunderland, loan exhibitions proved so popular that the North Eastern Railway Company laid on special trains, while the original museum building was deemed inadequate for the volume of visitors just fifteen years after its opening in
1879. In Sheffield, a letter to the local paper complained of ‘an invasion of Sheffield roughs of both sexes last Sunday pm. . . some hundreds of the worst played at gymnastics over the seats, and afterwards, with girls at their sides, made a promenade of the galleries'. An exhibition in Nottingham in 1872, ‘showing the application of fine art to industry', attracted over 2,500 visitors a week, amounting to a total of over 760,000; more than 100,000 visitors admired a special display in Halifax, and the national journals published regular pieces about exhibitions which ‘have attracted much attention on the part of the public having been inspected by tens of thousands'.
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Behind every public museum project were the private scholars and collectors who made things happen. The money from the Museums Acts could only be used for buying a site or constructing a building – not for acquiring objects for a collection – and so inevitably the creation and expansion of the new museums throughout the Victorian period was as much a personal as a municipal achievement. In a few cases, as at Ruskin's Sheffield museum, individual benefactors were to the fore, but more frequently private collectors simply made small cumulative contributions to activity in their towns or cities. They were the lifeblood of the system, lending, giving and bequeathing objects, volunteering their knowledge and expertise, and bringing their experienced eye to bear on acquisitions and displays. Just as Robinson had brought together an army of collectors for his 1862 exhibition at South Kensington, so museums up and down the country were turning to individuals to fill the cases. And just as Robinson was overwhelmed by eager contributors, so most local museums found collectors were only too willing to have their names attached to such a respectable municipal venture.

Unfortunately, this enthusiasm frequently gave an impression of amateurism and muddle. Even though many museums
established specialist loan committees to seek out and woo significant local collectors, most found it hard to turn down objects that they were offered on a more ad hoc basis. Not surprisingly, this tended to result in a diverse, and frequently bizarre, mixture of exhibits which often appeared even more confused as a consequence of poor presentation and interpretation. In 1874, a Royal Commission found that ‘the only label attached to nine specimens out of ten is “presented by Mr. or Mrs. So-andso,” the objects of the presentation having been either to cherish a glow of self-satisfaction in the bosom of the donor, or to get rid under the semblance of doing a good action of rubbish that had once been prized, but latterly had stood in the way'.
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Bursting with everything from butterflies and minerals to celebrity memorabilia and poorly executed watercolours, these museums were public testimony to the pervasiveness and irresistibility of collecting – but they also demonstrated the need for studious, focused and devoted collectors who could create something lasting and meaningful.

This was where the bigger London institutions, the national collections, might have stepped in. Although the provinces were generally new to the idea of museums, public collections in the capital had a longer history. Sir John Soane bequeathed his collection of antiquities, sculpture, furniture and paintings to the public in the early nineteenth century, and in 1838 the National Gallery was opened in Trafalgar Square. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the original collections of books, antiquities and natural history that had been brought together to found the British Museum in 1753 had been expanded to include ethnographic artefacts, Asian treasures, classical sculpture and key pieces such as the Rosetta Stone, engraved with the three scripts of ancient Egypt and brought back from Alexandria by British troops in 1801. In addition, several high-profile private institutions allowed at least some kind of public access: the independent Royal
Academy had held influential summer exhibitions since its formation by George III in 1768, while the British Institution, founded by art connoisseurs and private subscribers in 1805, held a series of loan exhibitions at its premises on Pall Mall, a popular society haunt. Throughout the century, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce had, as we have seen, been drawing the crowds to its series of exuberant trade shows.

In many cases, however, the visitor and would-be collector found much less encouragement in London than elsewhere in the country. Exhibitions at the Royal Academy and the British Institution were, in reality, rather closed affairs, partly because there was an entrance fee and partly because they were entangled with the tradition of gentleman's clubs and the artistic elite. They were extremely popular among certain sections of society but they did little to promote the idea of genuinely public access to art, nor did they necessarily suggest that collecting could be an egalitarian activity. The British Institution was governed by the interests of the aristocratic community that had made up its management since it was founded by the Marquess of Stafford; the Royal Academy was as much a stronghold for establishment artists as it had been when it was launched by successful painters like Sir Joshua Reynolds in the 1760s. The membership of these influential art organizations seemed to have evolved little from the days of clubs like the Society of Dilettanti, formed around 1732 with a select membership of the noble and the fashionable: according to Horace Walpole, ‘the nominal qualification is having been in Italy, and the real one, being drunk'.
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Even the growth of private commercial galleries in the 1870s and 1880s did little to alter the situation. With the most valuable markets in mind, most of them concentrated on an upper-class clientele and actively promoted the exclusive feel of the Royal Academy: the Grosvenor Gallery was established in the art marketplace of
Bond Street in 1877, for example, but its founder Sir Coutts Lindsay set it apart by nurturing an aristocratic air and a commitment to showing works from private collections. ‘The whole has the affect of a private salon, richly and harmoniously furnished,' noted one visitor, while another enthused at how quickly the Grosvenor's series of exhibitions and private viewings had become another stop on the ritualized merry-go-round of elite London social life: ‘Sunday afternoon parties at the Grosvenor Gallery, by personal invitation only, were some of the high points of the season.'
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