The Grosvenor Gallery: A Palace of Art in Victorian England
This was the first exhibition ever devoted to the history of the Grosvenor Gallery. An independent gallery in London from 1877 to 1890, it supported some of the most progressive and important artists of the period, including Edward Burne-Jones, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, John Everett Millais, James McNeill Whistler, Albert Moore, the French naturalists, the Newlyn School Painters, and the London and Irish impressionists.
The Grosvenor Gallery, called a “palace of art” in the London popular press, was established by Sir Coutts and Lady Blanche Lindsay as an alternative to the Royal Academy. The gallery was designed to emulate the private palaces of the aristocracy to which the Lindsays themselves belonged. One of the overall goals of the gallery was to display the works of underrepresented artists in an original way, abandoning the floor-to-ceiling arrangements seen at other venues of the period.
More than one hundred paintings, watercolors, and other works originally seen in different exhibitions at the Grosvenor Gallery were shown. To coincide with the exhibition, Yale University Press published a book on this subject.
Venues
Yale Center for British Art: March 2–April 28, 1996
Denver Museum of Art: June 1–August 25, 1996
Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne: September 13–November 3, 1996
Credits
The project, which was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, was co-curated by Colleen Denney, Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Wyoming, and Susan P. Casteras, Curator of Paintings at the Center.