Grosvenor Gallery
Encyclopedia
Art gallery
An art gallery or art museum is a building or space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art.Museums can be public or private, but what distinguishes a museum is the ownership of a collection...
in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
founded in 1877 by Sir Coutts Lindsay
Coutts Lindsay
Sir Coutts Lindsay, 2nd Baronet , was a British artist and watercolourist.-Life:Lindsay was the eldest son of Lieutenant-General Sir James Lindsay, son of the Hon. Robert Lindsay, second son of James Lindsay, 5th Earl of Balcarres...
and his wife Blanche. Its first directors were J. Comyns Carr
J. Comyns Carr
Joseph William Comyns Carr was an English drama and art critic, gallery director, author, poet, playwright and theatre manager....
and Charles Hallé
Edward Charles Hallé
Charles Edward Hallé , sometimes given as Edward Charles Hallé, was an English painter and gallery manager.He was a painter of history scenes, genre scenes, and portraits. He was the son of Sir Charles Halle, the german-born pianist and orchestra conductor, who emigrated to England during the...
. The gallery proved crucial to the Aesthetic Movement because it provided a home for those artists whose approaches the more classical and conservative Royal Academy
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...
did not welcome, such as Edward Burne-Jones
Edward Burne-Jones
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company...
and Walter Crane
Walter Crane
Walter Crane was an English artist and book illustrator. He is considered to be the most prolific and influential children’s book creator of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of...
.
History
The gallery was founded in Bond StreetBond Street
Bond Street is a major shopping street in the West End of London that runs north-south through Mayfair between Oxford Street and Piccadilly. It has been a fashionable shopping street since the 18th century and is currently the home of many high price fashion shops...
, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, in 1877 by Sir Coutts Lindsay
Coutts Lindsay
Sir Coutts Lindsay, 2nd Baronet , was a British artist and watercolourist.-Life:Lindsay was the eldest son of Lieutenant-General Sir James Lindsay, son of the Hon. Robert Lindsay, second son of James Lindsay, 5th Earl of Balcarres...
and his wife Blanche. They engaged J. Comyns Carr
J. Comyns Carr
Joseph William Comyns Carr was an English drama and art critic, gallery director, author, poet, playwright and theatre manager....
and Charles Hallé
Edward Charles Hallé
Charles Edward Hallé , sometimes given as Edward Charles Hallé, was an English painter and gallery manager.He was a painter of history scenes, genre scenes, and portraits. He was the son of Sir Charles Halle, the german-born pianist and orchestra conductor, who emigrated to England during the...
as co-directors. Lindsay and his wife were well-born and well-connected, and both were amateur artists. Blanche was born a Rothschild
Rothschild family
The Rothschild family , known as The House of Rothschild, or more simply as the Rothschilds, is a Jewish-German family that established European banking and finance houses starting in the late 18th century...
, and it was her money which made the whole enterprise possible.
The gallery was situated in a grandiose Italianate building, richly decorated and furnished. In deliberate contrast to the Royal Academy method, the pictures were widely spaced apart, with groups of one artist's work placed together. This enabled the spectator to form an overall impression of an artist's style, and was widely welcomed by the artists themselves. The Grosvenor was also the first gallery to be lit by electric light.
The opening was a highly fashionable event, attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales, and before long the Grosvenor was well established as a serious rival to the Royal Academy
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...
. Inevitably, many classical painters were drawn towards the Grosvenor, and a check of the lists of exhibits reveals a large number of classical titles. But the aesthetic movement was by its very nature eclectic, and therefore classical themes represent only one among many possible sources of inspiration. The tendency at the Grosvenor was to paint decorative, vaguely allegorical figure subjects, usually in classical robes, and usually with a suitable classical title of a nymph or goddess.
Important as the Grosvenor proved to be for the Aesthetic Movement, it did not cause the bitter rivalry between painters of the establishment and outsiders that took place in France for several reasons. First, Victorian England had comparatively little in the way of government patronage but there were enough wealthy patrons to go round. Probably for this reason, painters of all schools and aesthetic tendencies socialized together. In addition, when Frederick Lord Leighton served as President of the Royal Academy, he devoted a great deal of energy to making sure that paintings by outsiders received fair treatment and were prominently displayed at the annual exhibition, and he also successfully lobbied to gain election to the RA for major figures like Burne-Jones and Albert Moore whose work differed sharply from that of the academicians. Leighton, one of the bona fide stars of Victorian painting and sculpture, certainly proved himself to be an exemplary leader of the Victorian art world.
The Grosvenor displayed work by artists outside of the British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
mainstream, including Edward Burne-Jones
Edward Burne-Jones
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company...
, Walter Crane
Walter Crane
Walter Crane was an English artist and book illustrator. He is considered to be the most prolific and influential children’s book creator of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of...
and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti...
. In 1878, John Ruskin
John Ruskin
John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political...
visited the gallery to see work by Burne-Jones. An exhibition of paintings by James McNeill Whistler
James McNeill Whistler
James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American-born, British-based artist. Averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, he was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake". His famous signature for his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger...
was also on display. Ruskin's savage review of Whistler's work led to a famous libel case, brought by the artist against the critic. Whistler won a farthing in damages. The case made the gallery famous as the home of the Aesthetic movement, which was satirised in Gilbert and Sullivan
Gilbert and Sullivan
Gilbert and Sullivan refers to the Victorian-era theatrical partnership of the librettist W. S. Gilbert and the composer Arthur Sullivan . The two men collaborated on fourteen comic operas between 1871 and 1896, of which H.M.S...
's Patience, which includes the line, "greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery".
In 1888, after a disagreement with Lindsay, Comyns Carr and Hallé resigned from the gallery to found the rival New Gallery
New Gallery (London)
The New Gallery was an art gallery founded at 121 Regent Street W., London, in 1888 by J. Comyns Carr and Charles Edward Hallé. Carr and Hallé had been co-directors of Sir Coutts Lindsay's Grosvenor Gallery, but resigned from that troubled gallery in 1887....
, capturing Burne-Jones and many of the Grosvenor Gallery's other artists. The break-up of his marriage, financial constraints and personal conflicts forced Lindsay out of the gallery, which was taken over by his estranged wife.
Generating station
Upon returning from the Paris Exhibition of 1882, the Earl of CrawfordJames Lindsay, 26th Earl of Crawford
James Ludovic Lindsay, 26th Earl of Crawford and 9th Earl of Balcarres was a British astronomer, politician, bibliophile and philatelist. A member of the Royal Society, Crawford was elected president of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1878. He was a prominent Freemason.-Family:The Earl was the...
recommended that Lindsay install electric lighting in the gallery. In 1883, two Marshall
Marshall, Sons & Co.
-External links:* – at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia...
engines, each belted to a Siemens
Siemens & Halske
Siemens & Halske AG was a German electrical engineering company that later became part of Siemens AG.It was founded on 12 October 1847 as Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens & Halske by Ernst Werner von Siemens and Johann Georg Halske...
alternator
Alternator
An alternator is an electromechanical device that converts mechanical energy to electrical energy in the form of alternating current.Most alternators use a rotating magnetic field but linear alternators are occasionally used...
, were installed in a yard behind the gallery. The installation was a success, and neighbours began requesting a supply. Lindsay, Crawford and Lord Wantage then set up the Sir Coutts Lindsay Co. Ltd., and in 1885 constructed the Grosvenor Power Station. This was constructed under the gallery and had a capacity of 1,000 kilowatts. The station supplied an area reaching as far north as Regents Park, the River Thames
River Thames
The River Thames flows through southern England. It is the longest river entirely in England and the second longest in the United Kingdom. While it is best known because its lower reaches flow through central London, the river flows alongside several other towns and cities, including Oxford,...
to the south, Knightsbridge
Knightsbridge
Knightsbridge is a road which gives its name to an exclusive district lying to the west of central London. The road runs along the south side of Hyde Park, west from Hyde Park Corner, spanning the City of Westminster and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea...
to the west and the High Court of Justice
High Court of Justice
The High Court of Justice is, together with the Court of Appeal and the Crown Court, one of the Senior Courts of England and Wales...
to the east. However the system caused a lot of trouble, so much so that Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti
Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti
Sebastian Pietro Innocenzo Adhemar Ziani de Ferranti was an electrical engineer and inventor.-Personal life:...
gave advice as to how to resolve it in 1885. The station was made a substation
Electrical substation
A substation is a part of an electrical generation, transmission, and distribution system. Substations transform voltage from high to low, or the reverse, or perform any of several other important functions...
with the opening of Deptford Power Station
Deptford Power Station
Deptford Power Station was a coal-fired power station on the south bank of the River Thames at Deptford, south east London.-Deptford East:The first station was designed in 1887 by Sebastian de Ferranti for the London Electric Supply Corporation. It was located at the Stowage, a site to the west of...
.