Mosley Street
The building on Mosley Street was designed by Sir Charles Barry. If the name sounds familiar, it should. Barry went on to design the Houses of Parliament. He did Manchester first. The gallery was built between 1824 and 1835, in the Greek Ionic style, with a rusticated ashlar facade, an 11-bay frontage, and a central portico of six Ionic columns. It has been Grade I listed since 25 February 1952. It is one of the finest neoclassical buildings in the north of England, and most people in Manchester walk past it without looking up.
Next door on Princess Street stands the Athenaeum, also designed by Barry, built in 1837 in the Italian Palazzo style, and Grade II* listed. Dickens gave a speech there in 1843, the year he wrote A Christmas Carol. Manchester Corporation acquired it in 1938. In 2002, a £35 million refurbishment by Michael Hopkins and Partners linked the original gallery, the Athenaeum, and a new extension into a single connected space. The project won a RIBA competition in 1995, closed the gallery in 1998, and took four years to complete. The result is a building that moves from Georgian neoclassicism through Victorian Italian to contemporary glass without ever feeling disjointed.
The Royal Manchester Institution
The gallery began life in 1823 as the Royal Manchester Institution, a scholarly society dedicated to promoting literature, science, and the arts. Barry's building was commissioned to house it. The Institution's first painting was acquired in 1827: James Northcote's portrait of the actor Ira Aldridge, painted in 1826 when Aldridge was 19, exhibited as A Moor and now catalogued as Othello, the Moor of Venice. Aldridge was one of the first Black actors to achieve fame on the European stage. Manchester's first painting was a portrait of a Black man painted by a Royal Academician. It is not the origin story most people expect.
In 1882, the Institution transferred its premises and collections to Manchester Corporation, and the building became a public art gallery. The transfer came with a condition: the Corporation had to spend £2,000 a year on acquiring art for at least 20 years. That mandatory spending, sustained over two decades, is the reason the gallery's collection is as strong as it is. Manchester did not inherit its art. It bought it, systematically, with public money, because someone had the sense to write it into the contract.
The Pre-Raphaelites
Manchester Art Gallery holds one of the most important collections of Pre-Raphaelite painting in the world. This is not an exaggeration. The collection is deep, significant, and in some cases definitive.
William Holman Hunt's The Hireling Shepherd is here, painted in 1851, one of the founding works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. So is his The Light of the World, the 1851-1856 version. The original is at Keble College, Oxford; the more famous larger version hangs in St Paul's Cathedral. Manchester has the second of three. His The Scapegoat, painted at the Dead Sea in 1854-1855, is here. So is The Shadow of Death, his monumental 1870-1873 painting of Christ in the carpenter's workshop. Four major Holman Hunts in one building.
Ford Madox Brown's Work hangs here, painted between 1852 and 1865, one of the most ambitious paintings of the Victorian era. It shows a scene on Heath Street in Hampstead, crammed with figures from every class of society, from navvies digging a sewer to gentlemen watching from the pavement. Brown also painted the murals in Manchester Town Hall, a mile away. Between the gallery and the Town Hall, Manchester holds more Ford Madox Brown than anywhere else in the world.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Astarte Syriaca is here, painted in 1877 with Jane Morris as a Syrian goddess. It is the largest painting Rossetti ever made. John Everett Millais's Autumn Leaves, painted in 1856, is one of the most famous Pre-Raphaelite paintings in existence, and it was one of the works attacked by suffragettes in this building in 1913.
The gallery is not only Pre-Raphaelites. George Stubbs's Cheetah and Stag with Two Indians, painted around 1765, shows a cheetah given to George III with its two Indian handlers before a hunt in Windsor Great Park. It is arguably the single most important painting in the building, and it has nothing to do with the Brotherhood. The collection also holds over 2,000 oil paintings, 3,000 watercolours and drawings, 250 sculptures, and around 13,000 decorative art objects including ceramics, glass, furniture, metalwork, and wallpapers. The oldest object in the collection is an Egyptian canopic jar from around 1100 BC. The total runs to approximately 25,000 items. It is not a small gallery pretending to be a big one. It is a big gallery that most people outside Manchester have never heard of.
"Manchester did not inherit its art. It bought it, systematically, with public money, because someone had the sense to write it into the contract."
Valette and Lowry
Pierre Adolphe Valette was a French Impressionist painter who came to Manchester in 1905 and taught at the Manchester Municipal School of Art. He painted the city the way the French Impressionists painted Paris: wet streets, grey light, figures dissolving into fog and rain. His Albert Square, India House, and Bailey Bridge are among the most beautiful images of Edwardian Manchester in existence. The gallery holds several Valettes, and they are worth the visit on their own.
One of his students was L.S. Lowry. Valette taught Lowry how to see Manchester as a subject worth painting. Without Valette, Lowry might never have looked at the industrial landscape around him and decided it was art. The gallery holds Lowry's An Accident, painted in 1926, a crowd gathered at a canal in Pendlebury after a suicide. It was bought by Manchester Art Gallery in 1930, the first Lowry ever acquired by a public collection. The gallery also holds his Piccadilly Gardens, painted in 1954, one of his most recognisable city scenes. The teacher and the student, both represented on the same walls, and the first public collection to put money on him.
The Painting They Took Down
In January 2018, the gallery removed John William Waterhouse's Hylas and the Nymphs from its walls. The painting, from 1896, depicts the Greek myth of Hylas being lured into a pool by water nymphs. The gallery said it wanted to encourage debate about how women's bodies are displayed in art. The response was immediate and furious. Accusations of censorship, puritanism, and political correctness came from all sides. The gallery staff said they were completely taken by surprise by the ferocity of the reaction. The painting was rehung after one week.
The episode was clumsy, but the question it raised was not stupid. How should a gallery in 2018 display Victorian paintings of naked young women? Is context enough, or does the hanging itself endorse the gaze? The gallery got the execution wrong and the conversation right, which is roughly the opposite of what most institutions manage.
It was not the first time art had been attacked in this building. On 3 April 1913, three women — Lillian Forrester, Evelyn Manesta, and Annie Briggs — walked into the gallery and smashed the glass on 13 paintings, four of which were damaged. The targets included works by Holman Hunt, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Leighton, Millais, and G.F. Watts, the Pre-Raphaelites and Victorians that are still the reason people come. They were suffragettes. Forrester received three months in prison. Manesta received one month. Briggs was acquitted. Forrester and Manesta were covertly photographed in the exercise yard at Strangeways, and Manesta's photograph was doctored to hide the warder holding her by the neck before it was circulated to galleries across the country. It was among the first known uses of surveillance photography against suffragettes. Emmeline Pankhurst's movement had reached the gallery walls. The 1913 attack and the 2018 removal are separated by 105 years, but they are both about the same question: what belongs on a gallery wall, and who decides.
A Greek Ionic building on Mosley Street, designed by the man who went on to do the Houses of Parliament, holding 25,000 objects from an Egyptian canopic jar to a Waterhouse that caused a national argument. Pre-Raphaelites that the Tate would trade for. A French Impressionist who taught Lowry how to paint Manchester. Suffragettes who smashed the glass. Free entry, every day except Monday.
That's Hidden Manchester.