This nearly exemplary exhibition brings together some seventy pictures and a good deal of period memorabilia to present a snapshot of the mildly infamous Grosvenor Gallery in London, which from 1877 to 1890 was the chief artistic and social venue for second-generation pre-Raphaelites (Burne-Jones, Alma-Tadema, et al.), those associated with the Aesthetic Movement (Whistler and his followers), and sundry other important artists including George Frederic Watts (whom Henry James called “the first portrait painter in England”) and James Joseph Tissot.

The Grosvenor Gallery, located in New Bond Street in the heart of London’s gallery district, was the brainchild of Sir Coutts Lindsay—according to Whistler, “the handsomest man in London”—and his wife, Lady Blanche Lindsay, an aristocratic couple of advanced tastes and sporadic artistic ambition. Both Lindsays were amateur painters, and both exhibited occasionally at the Grosvenor Gallery. But Henry James was right to insist, in his review of the gallery’s inaugural exhibition in 1877, that their creation of the gallery was not a vanity operation, existing to provide them with “a place to exhibit [their] own productions.” The aesthetic achievement of the artists associated with the Grosvenor Gallery—and the organizers of the exhibition, Susan P. Casteras and Colleen Denney, have assembled good examples from most of its stars—was rarely (if ever) of the first rank. But in providing a lively and welcoming alternative to the Royal Academy—the raison d’être of the gallery—the Lindsays performed a valuable service not only to the artists they nurtured but to the life of London artistic culture generally.

As the organizers of this exhibition stress, the Lindsays sought to provide an alternative to the Royal Academy in more ways than one. Not only did they exhibit the period’s more innovative artists—or, as in the case of Watts, more innovative work by artists whose less daring efforts were welcome at the Royal Academy—they also pioneered new exhibition techniques. For example, they eschewed the crowded, floor-to-ceiling montage preferred at the Academy in favor of a more commodious arrangement in which an artist’s works would be grouped together with generous spacing between each picture. Alas, Sir Coutts was forward-looking in other ways as well: the Grosvenor Gallery was, as a press release for this exhibition notes, “the first commercial gallery in London to have an elegant restaurant on its premises” along with many other “amenities.” No doubt it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The Grosvenor’s inaugural exhibition attracted wide notice. The young Oscar Wilde as well as Henry James weighed in with enthusiastic notices. (The exhibition did not, however, spark Wilde’s critical acumen: “there are,” he wrote about Watts’s rather ghastly Love and Death, “perhaps few paintings to compare with this in intensity and marvel of conception.”) But the Grosvenor’s greatest stroke of good fortune came with John Ruskin’s declaration that Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: Falling Rocket amounted to “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” This led the infuriated Whistler to instigate the notorious libel suit against Ruskin that provided Londoners with so much entertainment at the time. (Whistler won the suit, but the victory was pyrrhic: the court awarded him only a shilling in damages, and so the legal fees bankrupted him.)

The notoriety generated by this suit gave the gallery a terrific boost right at the beginning, and its denizens were soon providing grist for the satiric mills of Punch magazine, which regularly lampooned the gallery. (A generous selection of these sallies is on view in the exhibition.) Grosvenor and its habitués even attracted the comedic gaze of Gilbert and Sullivan, who referred to the “greenery-yallery-Grosvenor-gallery-foot-in-the-grave -young-men” in Patience, their send-up of Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Movement. Lady Lindsay was a full partner—financial and in other ways—of the Grosvenor Gallery, but Sir Coutts managed to keep the gallery open after they separated in 1882. Additional financial reverses, however, forced him to close the gallery in 1890, after a run of fourteen years.

The organizers of this show write that they aimed “not to replicate specific rooms or exhibitions so much as to distill and evoke the gallery’s main achievements and key exhibition reforms in terms of major works of art, contributors, and issues.” In this they have succeeded admirably, and if this revisting of the Grosvenor Gallery is only nearly exemplary it is chiefly because of the occasional intrusion of feminist politics. Thus we are treated to a small amount of PC language (“spokespersons” etc.) and are assured that a section of the exhibition devoted to women artists bears witness to “a continuing concern with gender construction.” In the end, though, these are minor distractions from what is a modest but eminently informative exhibition about a neglected sliver of Victorian cultural history.

A catalogue of the exhibition, edited by Susan P. Casteras and Colleen Denney, has been published by the Yale University Press (209 pages, $34.95).