Newcastle's first art exhibitions and the language of civic humanism

Usherwood, Paul (2004) Newcastle's first art exhibitions and the language of civic humanism. In: Creating and Consuming Culture in North-East England, 1660-1830. Ashgate, Farnham, pp. 141-151. ISBN 9780754606031

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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.

Item Type:	Book Section
Subjects:	V300 History by topic
Department:	Faculties > Arts, Design and Social Sciences > Arts
Related URLs:	Library Catalogue
Depositing User:	EPrint Services
Date Deposited:	04 Aug 2008 14:39
Last Modified:	12 Oct 2019 19:42
URI:	http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/2335

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