Huge display of fine art, industrial design and local products

IF anyone thought the Great Exhibition of 1851 at Hyde Park in London, which celebrated the Works of Industry of all Nations was the last word in exhibitions, then 1876 would have come as a pleasant surprise.

The 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia celebrated a century of American Independence and could be classed as the first World Fair. Across the pond, Victorian Wrexham was keen to encourage commerce, believing that any place that wanted to show that it was a bastion of industrial progress and entrepreneurship had to have an exhibition.

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Where Wrexham trod, Paris and Glasgow followed. A temporary exhibition hall was built covering the land between Egerton Street, Rhosddu Road, Argyle Street and Hope Street.

This resulted in a huge display area featuring fine art, industrial design and products of the local industries - bricks, tiles and terracotta; mineral water and brewing and engineering. Like all the great exhibitions, the hall was temporary and everyone in the press complained about how much it all cost!

Plan of the Art Treasures Exhibition building, part of the Great Exhibition in Wrexham 1876. Image courtesy of Phil Phillips

The exhibition was opened on July 22, 1876 by the Duke and Duchess of Westminster. The entrance to the exhibition hall was the Westminster Buildings on Hope Street. Inside the hall were 51 business stands, more than 900 works of art and more than 2,300 exhibits varying from metalwork, pottery and porcelain to antiquities, sculpture and textiles. The scale of the exhibition (see plan) was in stark contrast to the size of the town, which had fewer than 10,000 inhabitants.

Not everybody was enamoured of Wrexham's enterprise. The Spectator dispatched a reluctant correspondent to the town and he began a churlish report by remarking: "What an ugly and uninteresting place it is. Flat, dull, dirty, and crowded with people who are unbeautiful exceedingly, and whose talk is so unpleasant to hear when it is in English that it is quite a relief, on pushing through groups who represent obstruction's apathy in a new sense, for they never dream of letting anyone pass without pushing, to come upon real natives who do their swearing and other amenities of speech in Welsh.

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"Wrexham seems as unlikely a place in which to pass a happy day, in any aesthetic interpretation of happiness, as one could not wish to see and sees what an ugly and uninteresting place it is."

Opening of Wrexham Art Treasures Exhibition. Image courtesy of Phil Phillips

Our delightful correspondent is equally disparaging about the town, the exhibition buildings and the intelligence of the populace, remarking that "one would be inclined to pronounce the aesthetic fare offered to the people at Wrexham much too fine and delicately flavoured for their taste or comprehension".

When it came to the art exhibition itself, however, our correspondent soon changed tack and he marvelled at the paintings loaned to the exhibition by eminent local gentry and those from further afield. He marvels at the "Murillos, the Cuyps, the Vandycks, all the art treasures, some old acquaintances, others seen for the first time, which are shown to extraordinary advantage in the evening, when the exhibition is brilliantly lighted. The German, Flemish, and Dutch schools are grandly represented".

The medallion struck for the Exhibition, on the obverse it depicts a potter at work watched by a blacksmith. Image courtesy of Phil Phillips

He enthuses "perhaps the choicest collection of the works of living artists, both English and foreign - quality, not number, being the test - ever exhibited, is to be seen at Wrexham. If he was excited at the art collection he was beside himself at the artefacts on display.

"The cabinets of gems, the bronzes, the carvings, the antiquities, the miniatures, the lace, the unique manuscripts, the marvellous ironwork, the things which illustrate the past, and help us to realise it by sight and touch - these are the more important attractions which this unique and adventurous exhibition has to offer. The collection of gold and silver plate alone, partly belonging to the great magnificoes of the Principality, is more splendid than anything out of the grand conception of Belshazzar's Feast."

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So this exhibition really had the wow factor added to it by precious objects of antiquity from the precious pebble of Owain Gwynedd to Japanese Satsuma ware.

Our correspondent, however, could not resist a passing shot. "After a very short time, the exhibition grows so much upon the previously desponding visitor that he makes up his mind it will take him at least a week to appreciate thoroughly the art treasures which are displayed in the unlikely and uncongenial town of Wrexham."

Unbeknown to him, this unique market town with an industrial hub had precious minerals beyond his ken, and a skilled workforce able to make full use of them. We were not scared to make an exhibition of ourselves either!