Palace of the People
Palace of the People

Author: Jan Piggott

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9780299200947

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Built for the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Crystal Palace originally graced London's Hyde Park with Joseph Paxton's remarkable geometric design and groundbreaking use of glass elements, prefiguring the modern movement in architecture. After the exhibition a group of bankers, railway directors, and men of influence moved the structure to a new site in south London, rebuilt it to an even grander scale, and set about its promotion as a "palace for the multitude." Here were exhibitions, concerts, and spectaculars to fill a splendid day out for Londoners of all classes and interests. Filled with plaster casts of great art treasures, life-sized models of dinosaurs, waterworks, and gardens, the Crystal Palace became a center of both education and entertainment from the Victorian era through its destruction by fire in1936. Copublished with C. Hurst & Co., London Wisconsin edition for sale only in North and South America, U.S. territories and dependencies, and the Philippines.

The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857
The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857

Author: ElizabethA. Pergam

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 1351542796

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An overdue study of a groundbreaking event, this is the first book-length examination of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857. Intended to rehabilitate Manchester's image at a heady time of economic prosperity, the Exhibition became a touchstone for aesthetic, social, and economic issues of the mid-nineteenth century. Reverberations of this moment can be followed to the present day in the discipline of art history and its practice in public museums of Europe and America. Highlighting the tension between art and commerce, philanthropy and profit, the book examines the Exhibition's organization and the presentation of the works of art in the purpose-built Art Treasures Palace. Pergam places the Exhibition in the context of contemporary debates about museum architecture and display. With an analysis of the reception of both "Ancient" and "Modern" paintings, the book questions the function of exhibitions in the construction of an art historical canon. The book also provides an essential reference tool: a compiled list of all of the paintings exhibited in 1857 that are now in public collections throughout the world, with an analysis of the collecting trends manifest in their provenance.