Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture

Abstract

The spectacular display of industrial products showcased at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace is familiar to most enthusiasts of 19thcentury Victorian culture. Using the Great Exhibition as a backdrop to her historical narrative about design reform in Britain, Lara Kriegel restores the significance of labor to the field of cultural history, highlighting how quotidian tradesmen assisted in shaping the ideological missions of once humble institutions such as the modern-day Victoria & Albert Museum in London’s South Kensington. While these educational and political battles raged within studio classrooms and the halls of Parliament, activist teachers of the fine arts such as Benjamin Robert Haydon and Charles Heath Wilson deliberated over the merits of drawing the human figure and Etruscan vases, jockeying for the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of their students in training. The pursuit of genius, as perceived by one of the protagonists, William Dyce of the Government School of Design, was frowned upon, not for its elevation of the individual ego in artistic creation, but for its lack of modesty (and perhaps morality) on the part of the artist in pursuing the “useless” occupation of being a painter. Torn between remaining common men with ordinary tastes and becoming savants who could be assimilated into the proper world of art, these British artisans serve as reminders of those who brought some of the most important Victorian issues of class, economics, education and gender to the attention of their middle-class peers, as well as to contemporary consumers of decorative ornament.