Corrie - the play
We have two pairs of tickets to give away to Corrie, a new stage show based on the soap opera
FIND OUT MOREFree beauty products
Your chance to win a fantastic three-piece 'skin perfector' set worth more than £120.
FIND OUT MOREAspiring entrepreneur?
Chartered Accountants Lucas Reis are offering an hour's free business consultation.
FIND OUT MOREArt blast from the past
One hundred and fifty years ago, Manchester exploded onto the international cultural map by staging the biggest art exhibition ever to take place in the UK. This month, Manchester Art Gallery gives you the chance to relive that landmark Victorian artistic event with a hotly anticipated commemorative exhibition.
The 1857 exhibition
Art Treasures of the United Kingdom was a truly awesome mega-exhibition, held in a huge, custom-built glass pavilion at Old Trafford in May 1857.
Featuring more than 16,000 exhibits, including paintings, sculptures, photographs and decorative arts borrowed mainly from a range of private collections, it was a huge popular hit and a triumph of scholarship. It presented a coherent history of western art and influenced the way art was displayed in galleries across the world. It also made some newly-unveiled masterpieces famous, including Michelangelo's The Madonna and Child with Saint John and Angels, which was nicknamed The Manchester Madonna.
The show was opened by Prince Albert and visited by over 1.3 million people, including Queen Victoria, Charles Dickens, Florence Nightingale and the French emperor Louis Napoleon.
Typical of the glowing press coverage the event received was the following excerpt from The Times: "Manchester yesterday was the scene of an event almost unique in the history of art in England or perhaps the world. An exhibition of art treasures never before equalled for extent and importance."
The way Art Treasures of the United Kingdom came about is almost as fascinating as the exhibition itself, as Manchester Art Gallery curator Ruth Shrigley explains:
"The model of the large blockbuster exhibition was established with the 1851 exhibition in London. There was another exhibition in Dublin in 1853, which was organised by someone called John Cannellan Dean. Both of those exhibitions focused on the industrial achievements of this country and were not really art-focused.
"Dean had this idea to stage a huge exhibition, like the London and Dublin exhibitions, but just with works of art. He realised there was enough material in this country to do it. And he thought that people would be generous enough to loan if they thought that the exhibition would not only display the art treasures of this country but also help educate people.
"He thought Manchester would be a good place for it because it was ideally situated in terms of its geographical location and had a very good railway network.
"Dean had already met a Mancunian called Thomas Fairbairn, who had inherited a big engineering works and had lots of money which he ploughed into collecting works of art. So he wrote to Fairbairn to suggest staging an event like this in Manchester. Fairbairn obviously thought this was a very good idea because he then got together a group of Manchester-based wealthy businessmen, who decided that they were going to go ahead with staging it.
"But they needed to create a fund to enable them to identify and secure a site, and build a suitable building. Astonishingly, within a month they managed to raise the amount of money they needed to go ahead with it. And they did it by asking people they knew, who were wealthy people in the city and surrounding area, to contribute either £1,000 or £500 to underwrite the exhibition on the understanding that if it made a profit they would get their money back, which they did."
It took just 15 months from the time the idea was suggested to Thomas Fairbairn to the opening of the exhibition, which was an amazing feat even by Mancunian standards.
"It was the biggest ever art exhibition to be staged in the country, possibly in the world, and it was achieved at a time before modern communication," says Shrigley. "We would now struggle to do something like that in five years, even if we could afford the shipment and insurance of all those works of art.
"I think it really shows the vision and can-do spirit that characterised Victorian Manchester and made it the first industrial city. These were successful industrialists, who applied the drive and organisational skills that had made them successful in business to organising an art exhibition."
The exhibition attracted visitors from Europe and America, as well as from all parts of the UK, and made Manchester a cutting-edge cultural destination. It also inspired the founding of the Hallé, which is now the oldest philharmonic orchestra in the UK.
Shrigley explains: "The organisers wanted to have music in the palace of art and they engaged Charles Hallé to gather together musicians to play there every day. At the end of the exhibition they decided to form the Hallé Orchestra."
So how do you stage an exhibition that tells the story of an extraordinary artistic event that transformed British attitudes to art? And how do you make it relevant to the 21st century visitor?
The 2007 exhibition
"What we want to do is try and evoke the atmosphere of the 1857 exhibition so that today's visitor realises quite what an amazing achievement it was for Manchester," says Shrigley. "So in the first section of the exhibition we set the scene and explain the social, political and economic climate of the city in the 1850s, while in the last section we look at how Manchester has changed 150 years on. What were the important buildings then, how many of them are still left and what are our key landmark buildings now? What happened to all the artwork? All these things were in UK collections then, but where are they now?
"So the exhibition is structured so that you're looking back but also thinking and comparing it with now."
The new exhibition is a unique opportunity to see a diverse range of artworks by some of the world's most important artists, borrowed from national collections, on show together. Around 170 outstanding works of art from the original show, including work by British artists such as Hogarth, Gainsborough, Turner and Constable, as well as the Pre-Raphaelites and Old Masters, are going on display. The exhibition will also feature decorative artworks, including early Wedgwood ceramics, European porcelain, Venetian glass, Limoges enamels, Renaissance metalwork and European armour.
But although Shrigley admits most people will be attracted to the exhibition by the big name artists, she hopes they will discover some unexpected treasures when they arrive.
"One of the highlights of the exhibition is the historic return to the city of Michelangelo's The Manchester Madonna because it has had so much publicity. And you can pick out other big names from the original exhibition.
"But we are also showing contextual items that I believe are as engaging and interesting as the major artwork. There will be a guidebook which had sketches in it made by a visitor in 1857, for example. And we are also showing two paintings of Victorian Manchester, which have never been on public display before."
Art Treasures in Manchester: 150 years on runs from Oct 6, 2007 until Jan 27, 2008 at Manchester Art Gallery. Entry is free. Visit www.manchesterartgalleries.org for more information.