Book Description

Merseyside has one of the richest public collections of art in provincial Britain, much of it originally assembled in nineteenth-century private collections and then donated to public institutions by the owners. The essays in this booklet discuss four of the nineteenth-century collectors, men whose tastes in pictorial art ranged from old masters to the Pre-Raphaelites. One of the four also collected, on a large scale, ceramics and other decorative artifacts. These individuals commissioned the work of local artists, to encourage and support them. They also founded societies and institutions, partly in order to display their collections and thus educate the local public. The riches of the art they brought into Liverpool or their support generated in the locality was, inevitably, an expression of their personal wealth - riches in art indeed. But these particular individuals were more than merely avid collectors of lofty patrons. They held clear views about the social and moral value of art and about its contemporary "progress", views expressed implicitly in their collections and in two instances also in public statements.