The Fine Art's courts in the Crystal Palace. First series. North-West side. The Egyptian court; the Greek court; an apology for colouring the Greek court; the Roman court; the Alhambra court; the Nineveh court.

Built for the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Crystal Palace originally graced London's Hyde Park with Joseph Paxton's remarkable geometric design and groundbreaking use of glass elements, prefiguring the modern movement in architecture. After the exhibition a group of bankers, railway directors, and men of influence moved the structure to a new site in south London, rebuilt it to an even grander scale, and set about its promotion as a "palace for the multitude." Here were exhibitions, concerts, and spectaculars to fill a splendid day out for Londoners of all classes and interests. Filled with plaster casts of great art treasures, life-sized models of dinosaurs, waterworks, and gardens, the Crystal Palace became a center of both education and entertainment from the Victorian era through its destruction by fire in1936. Copublished with C. Hurst & Co., London Wisconsin edition for sale only in North and South America, U.S. territories and dependencies, and the Philippines.

Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition is the first book to situate the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 in a truly global context. Addressing national, imperial, and international themes, this collection of essays considers the significance of the Exhibition both for its British hosts and their relationships to the wider world, and for participants from around the globe. How did the Exhibition connect London, England, important British colonies, and significant participating nation-states including Russia, Greece, Germany and the Ottoman Empire? How might we think about the exhibits, visitors and organizers in light of what the Exhibition suggested about Britain’s place in the global community? Contributors from various academic disciplines answer these and other questions by focusing on the many exhibits, publications, visitors and organizers in Britain and elsewhere. The essays expand our understanding of the meanings, roles and legacies of the Great Exhibition for British society and the wider world, as well as the ways that this pivotal event shaped Britain’s and other participating nations’ conceptions of and locations within the wider nineteenth-century world.

The marble halls of the British Museum might seem the natural habitat for classical sculpture, but in the nineteenth century its sombre displays were far from being the only place that people encountered antiquities. From 1854, a rival collection of classical sculpture, comprising plaster casts from major European museums and scaled down architectural features, was on show in the South London suburb of Sydenham, in the Crystal Palace which had housed the Great Exhibition of 1851. By the late 1850s, two million visitors were passing through the glass doors of the Sydenham Crystal Palace each year, more than twice as many as recorded at the British Museum. Many more people, and from a greater variety of social strata, saw the painted cast of the Parthenon frieze in Sydenham than the original in Bloomsbury. Utilizing an extensive variety of archival material, including diaries, scrapbooks and photographs, Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace evokes visitor experiences at Sydenham, and examines the discussion that arose around the presentation of classical plaster casts to a mass audience. It uncovers the social, political, and aesthetic role of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture in modern Britain, assessing how classical art figured in debates over design reform, taste, beauty and morality, class and gender, and race and imperialism.

This volume is dedicated to Dr. Holly Pittman, Bok Family Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania and curator of the Near Eastern Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Penn Museum). It was conceived to honor her extraordinary contributions to the field of Near Eastern studies as archaeologist, art historian, mentor, professor, and friend--Foreword.