Towneley from A to Z
Towneley from A to Z
After the first loan exhibition, which opened on 20th May, 1903, there were normally two exhibitions a year that opened around spring and autumn and ran for around four or five months. These were called the Summer and Winter exhibitions but depending upon the opening date some were titled the Spring or Autumn exhibitions. The winter exhibition catalogues did not sell well and were usually not published after 1906. The catalogues included displays of work by local artists and listings of the fledgling museum contents in addition to the descriptions of the loan exhibits.
There are copies of the exhibition catalogues in the library including a bound copy of the catalogues from 1903 to 1920. There was no register of the permanent collections before 1932 and the contents of early catalogues provide a good record of the museum contents before 1920. They were the source of later inventory listings, which accounts for the many catalogue entries in the library copies having individual lines being cut out.
By 1928, the annual exhibition was almost entirely made up of objects from the permanent collections but exhibition catalogues continued to be published each year up until 1939. Two more annual exhibition catalogues were published in 1948 and 1949 before a final undated catalogue was printed in 1952.