4 - The Bible, Classical Antiquity, and the Invention of Victorian Art at the 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition

Summary

The Fine Arts Department of the Manchester Jubilee Exhibition of 1887 set out to provide a comprehensive exhibition of art made in Britain during Queen Victoria’s reign. This was the first ever exhibition of ‘Victorian art’; it marks a significant moment in the formation of a national ‘school’ of art in Britain, and in the presentation of this national story to a mass audience. The exhibition was avowedly commercial, concerned with progress and manufacture. Yet it was images of the past – and the biblical and classical pasts in particular – which dominated the Central Hall of the Fine Arts Department in this apparently ‘modern’ display. These pasts also appeared prominently throughout the rest of the Fine Arts Department. This chapter explores the relationships between the Bible, classical antiquity, and the mass audiences for art who thronged to look at the nineteenth-century oil painting and sculpture on display at Manchester. What role did the Bible and antiquity play in the invention of Victorian art at the Manchester Jubilee Exhibition? And what can responses to the exhibition at Manchester tell us about Victorian understandings of biblical and classical works?