Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–1901) was an age of expanding population, industry, prosperity and dominion. Interest in art grew, and exhibition-visiting became an increasingly popular pastime. The wealthy amassed large picture collections, often focussing on the work of contemporary British painters. Art criticism was more widespread and more influential than ever before. On the whole the Victorians were confident about their artistic achievements; many thought that they were experiencing an age of unprecedented creativity, which was the equal of any previous artistic period. Indeed by the end of the century, artists such as JE Millais, GF Watts and Frederic Leighton, were being compared with Titian, Michelangelo and Raphael. On the other hand, some felt that the period was marked by a decline in standards of taste and thus art production, and challenges to prevailing values were made by successive groups of artists, including the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, formed in 1848.

Many of the paintings shown here reflect the taste of a new class of collectors – industrialists, merchants and entrepreneurs – enriched by the Industrial Revolution and empowered by a series of parliamentary reforms. Such collectors promoted art that embodied middle-class values: propriety, respectability, hard work, the sanctity of family life, piety and self-improvement. In this context art was viewed as a moral teacher; its purpose was to educate the mind and benefit the soul. The importance of narrative in art can be linked to the popularity of the novel in this period. Attention to detail, story telling and characterisation were admired as much in paintings as in the literary works of Dickens, Thackeray and the Brontës. Equally important were modern-life subjects, ranging from panoramas of Victorian society, to more intimate modern moral problems. As a reviewer remarked in 1854, ‘for Art to be a living thing amongst us, she must deal with subjects and themes from life’.

This display has been devised by curator Christine Riding

BP British Art Displays 1500-2005