In May 1857 the industrial revolution was at its height, the new-found wealthy were at their most extravagant and The City of Manchester held the largest exhibition of art ever seen. Rolling in new money made in the cotton mills, Manchester was also a filthy, smelly, industrial hell with no sanitation, riotous industrial growth and a low life expectancy.
Art Treasures of Great Britain showed the public for the first time the extraordinary riches of Britain's great private aristocratic collections. It was visited by more than 1.3 million people. Special trains were laid on to allow factory workers to attend - the moral tone was high. This immense celebration of art as "treasure" was intended to demonstrate that industrialists of the north cared about more than just money.
So the great art critic and social theorist John Ruskin was invited to lecture at the show. If the burghers of Manchester were expecting a pat on the back, they were disappointed. Ruskin challenged his startled audience to think hard about the nature of wealth. What really got him going was their failure to recognise their responsibility for the preservation of great art. He had recently witnessed in Italy the destruction of some of the most precious works of European art, and launched an impassioned tirade about the "den of monkeys" he had witnessed in Italy:
" ... squabbling continually about nuts, and the best places on the ... trees; and all this monkeys' den filled, by mischance, with precious pictures, and the witty and willful beasts always wrapping themselves up and going to sleep in pictures or tearing holes in them to grin through: or tasting them and spitting them out again or twisting them up into ropes and making swings of them ... "
Ruskin's alarm seeded an idea that demanded action. Instead of wasting their money buying copies of the Old Masters, the newly-rich middle class should instead take steps to save the originals that were at risk. In 1903, the National Art-Collections Fund was at last established as an independent charity funded by members of the public and charged with saving art for the nation. Now called simply The Art Fund, we have since then added 860,000 works to museums in the UK. This year we successfully campaigned to save Turner's Blue Rigi from export. The spectacular Dumfries House, without our intervention, would have been sold and its unique furniture collection broken up.
But The Art Fund is not just about Britain's artistic heritage. We also want to ensure our public art collections are as relevant and inspiring as the 1857 exhibition. Earlier this year we launched a new initiative - Art Fund International is designed to encourage regional museums and galleries to build collections of non-British contemporary art.
The challenges facing us today are greater than ever. Records are broken at art auctions almost every week. The global rich fly into London next week (by executive jet, of course) for the Frieze Art Fair. The main subject of discussion is whether this summer's international banking shambles will lower prices. And, while art continues to be an accessory of the wealthy, in the public sphere the vast demands of the health service, social security and education ensure that art remains a tiny blip at the edge of the political radar screen.
So, following Ruskin's example, we need to find ways to mobilise private philanthropy. We must encourage the rich not just to buy fast cars and football clubs, but to invest in the cultural life of the nation.
One simple way to do it, as I've argued before, is to introduce some new tax breaks - allow businesses to offset their donations to museums, parks and galleries against corporation tax payments. This approach really works. In France companies can write off 90% of the value of a gift of a major work of art against their corporation tax bill. And it would make sense to extend such tax breaks to the individual. In America and many other countries, people can write off gifts of works of art against their income tax bill. This is, as yet, impossible in the UK. If Ruskin was alive today I wonder what kind of language he would use to persuade the politicians to think again.