'Walking for pleasure'? Bodies of display at the Manchester art-treasures exhibition in 1857

The scale, ambition and, arguably, the art-historical significance of the Art-Treasures Exhibition held in Manchester in 1857 was unprecedented in Britain, and has not been equalled subsequently. In all over 16,000 works of art were gathered together in the Art-Treasures Palace at Old Trafford, and when the exhibition closed after five months, over 1,300,000 visitors had passed through its turnstiles. Prince Albert officially approved the venture on condition that the exhibition would provide more than the 'mere gratification of public curiosity' and should instead 'enable, in a practical way the most uneducated eye to gather the lessons which ages of thorough and scientific research have attempted to abstract'. In effect, a wide and inclusive public was being invoked via the familiar metonymic substitution of the 'eye' for the person of the spectator and yet it was the quantity and conduct of visitors walking, looking and consuming bodies that provoked a stream of commentary and debate, and that constituted an unofficial register of the exhibition's success. Recovery of the experiences and observations of the 'social body' of the exhibition shows that neither the coded messages of the display schema nor the example set by prestigious visitors were able to direct the behaviour and aesthetic responses of many spectators. In that sense, the practices and public of the Art-Treasures Exhibition were very specific to the conditions of mid-nineteenth-century Manchester, yet stand as a salutary example to exhibition historians and curators today. © Association of Art Historians 2007.