Alex Kidson Bücher

The year 2002 marks the bicentenary of the death of George Romney, one of the key figures in British art in the late 18th century. A chief rival of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough - and for much of his career more fashionable than both - he was known both as a portraitist and as a draftsman. His countless studies for literary and mythological pictures, made in private moments but which he never had time to paint, are executed in a bold, spontaneous style that mark him as one of the first Romantics.

After a period of 'darkness' when Liverpool - the second city of the British Empire- lacked the kind of annual public art exhibition enjoyed by many of Britain's other provincial centres, light dawned in 1871 when a group of town councillors gambled with public funds to create the first Liverpool Autumn Exhibition. Hailed a success, the exhibition would go on to become an annual event and a cultural institution, the Royal Academy of the North of England.0From 1877 the history of the Autumn Exhibition was intertwined with that of Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery, but it was during its first six years of growth that its immense popularity was sealed. This new study anatomises those six little-known Victorian art exhibitions, and assembles images of the key, and representative, works that were seen and sold in them