| Summary: | 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.
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