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. From 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.