Newcastle’s First Art Exhibitions and the Language of Civic Humanism

Abstract

This chapter looks at the way debates about the role of visual art in Britain in the early nineteenth century were couched in the language of eighteenth-century civic humanism. In so doing, it deploys archival research on the struggle for control of public art exhibitions in Newcastle at the time. What emerges is that a newly-assertive middle-class intelligentsia in the town viewed art exhibitions as an instrument of moral and intellectual improvement whereas the other interested party, resident artists, saw them chiefly as a show-case for their own work. Significantly, however, even the latter felt obliged to pay at least lip-service to the idea of art serving an educational purpose. It builds on Usherwood’s earlier research on early nineteenth-century provincial art for the catalogue essay for Art for Newcastle: Thomas Miles Richardson and the Newcastle Exhibitions, 1822-1843, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1984, and his chapter, ‘Art on the Margins: from Bewick to Baltic’ in R.Colls and B. Lancaster, A Modern History of Newcastle upon Tyne, Phillimore, 2001.