
“Manchester’s collection is worth almost as much as the Louvre’s” commented French art critic Théophile Thoré regarding the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 – the largest art exhibition to be held in the UK and possibly in the world. While the British public milled pleasurably around the Exhibition’s ‘Oriental Court’, soaking in the triumphant collection of trophies seized from British colonies, public revolts against British rule erupted across India. The ‘Indian Mutiny’ was the country’s First War of Independence, resulting in over 100,000 deaths.
In just fifteen months, the magnificent three-acre ‘Art Treasures Palace’ of iron and glass was constructed in Old Trafford. A railway station was specifically built to transport the 1.3 million visitors who attended the Exhibition, in the mere 142 days that it was erected for. Intent on dispelling the negative connotations of industrial Manchester as a polluted “Hell on Earth”, as claimed by German philosopher Engels, 16,000 private art pieces were displayed to expose the working class to high culture. A tenth of these pieces were colonial objects, displayed to provide the “highest educational value” for the British public according to Chairman Fairbairn. Of course, these stolen art pieces were displayed with colonial pride, isolated from the European art of Michelangelo and Hogarth to highlight imperial dynamics rather than artistic richness. This physical separation enabled art critic Waring and French Curator Alfred Darcel to completely disregard its existence in their extensive reports of the Exhibition.
An emphasis was placed on mass accessibility to affluent culture to “elevate the taste of all visitors”. In reality, this was merely a performative endeavour: Charles Dickens described that the visitors “did everything, in short except examining the pictures”. Working-class visitors were often involuntarily taken to the Exhibition by their wealthy employers for the sake of enforcing the enrichment of low culture. Had the art pieces been labelled, and had educational brochures not been costly, perhaps the working class could have been artistically enlightened. Either way, the origins of the Indian and Chinese art were sometimes displayed as Persian to bolster opulence, an attempt to project Manchester as not just a “Cottonopolis”, but a city of aristocratic taste. Despite this, William Cavendish was not deterred from questioning: “What in the world do you want with art in Manchester? Why can’t you stick to your cotton spinning?”.
Along with the dismantling of the Art Treasures Palace came the dismantling of its memory in popular history. With the stubborn image of Manchester as a city of cholera-ridden slums rather than an exquisite epicentre of art, traces of the exhibition’s displays of Indian and Chinese art have been hidden away with it.