History of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool 1873-2000

Abstract

This unofficial history of the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, formerly the largest municipal art gallery in England, and since 1986 a national museum, is an insider account by two long-serving former members of its senior staff. The Gallery owes its name to the brewer Andrew Barclay Walker (1824–93), a staunch Tory with only a modest interest in art but probably the richest man in Liverpool, who announced in 1873, the year of his election as Mayor, that he would erect ‘at my sole expense’ a public art gallery, to provide a venue for the Liverpool Autumn Exhibitions. These selling exhibitions of new art, modelled on those at the Royal Academy, had been organized since 1871 by the municipal council. Thus, the Walker was built not to house a formerly private collection, but to accommodate an annual show of contemporary art from which a public collection would gradually be formed. A spokesman explained in 1877 that the councillors ‘did not want a man who was a great judge of pictures or to dictate to them’, so the earliest curators of the Walker were primarily administrators rather than museum professionals like those running the South Kensington Museum, and until the 1930s effective control lay with the Arts and Exhibitions Sub-Committee of the City Council. Its chairman during the first decades of the Gallery’s existence was the forceful Philip Rathbone (1828–96), a Liberal Unitarian merchant and an art collector, who bequeathed many fine paintings to the Walker. To counter press complaints that the Gallery would be ‘almost exclusively used by the upper classes’, he insisted that ‘Art is the permanent expression of a nation’s thought ... what literature is to the individual mind art is to the common mind of the community’.