Introduction

The first permanent display of paintings in a purpose-built art gallery was Alderman Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery which opened in 1789. Perhaps most surprising is the realisation that so many diverse talents in such a turbulent century could broadly agree on so much; and that, again, even in the 1890s, many of the precepts laid down by Sir Joshua Reynold more than a century earlier in his Discourses would have met with approval from art teachers. The key words associated with their attitudes and their art would be ‘high’, ‘distant’, ‘formal’, ‘grandeur’, ‘gravitas’ and ‘noble’. When Luke Fildes was paid £600 by the Municipal Art Gallery of Warrington for his painting Fair, Quiet and Sweet Rest in 1872, his grandmother, who could presumably recall eighteenth-century values, remarked: ‘no picture is worth that much’. The chapter also provides an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.