The Promotion of the Visual Arts in Britain, 1835-1860

Abstract

The government Select Committees of 1835-36 and 1841, certain wealthy Midland industrialists, and the Art Union of London aggressively promoted the visual arts as a means of creating social harmony and maintaining British manufacturing supremacy during the early Victorian period. Their methods and motives in urging art upon the “masses” are examined with a view to understanding the extent to which these activities were prompted by a desire to advance class interests. In each case economic concerns are evident immediately. The working classes were exposed to exhibitions of fine and industrial arts and inducted into schools of design in order that they could produce more attractive manufactured goods. Exposure of middle and upper-middle classes to the fine arts was intended to create a new market for British goods, whether manufactured or produced by painters. Economic manipulation was matched by social manipulation. Behind the rhetoric of self-help, cooperation between the classes, and patriotic duty, lurks a concerted effort by the three interest groups to control both middle- and working class aspirations. The practice and patronage of art were seen by those who desired social advancement as potent means of ascendancy. By promising their social inferiors the benefits of engagement with the fine arts on the one hand, yet carefully limiting their use of and access to them on the other, the three groups achieved their goals of class containment and enhanced consumption of British goods at home and abroad during a politically turbulent time. Although other analyses have been made of the nineteenth-century outworking of class interests on the part of the Government Schools of Design and the Manchester industrialists, this is the first attempt to apply such an analysis to the Art Union of London and more generally to Victorian promotion of the fine arts.