Industrialists have always used their wealth to buy and collect great art. But something more was going on when the textile magnates of late 19th- and early 20th-century Manchester began to collect prints made by Albrecht Dürer.
Dürer, the great artist of 15th- and 16th-century Renaissance Nuremberg, adopted techniques in the new field of printmaking, and his art embraced the revolutionary products emerging from the economically dynamic world around him. So his work was not only artistically prestigious, but also exemplified a sense of innovation that chimed with the Manchester factory owners, who prided themselves on being at the cutting edge of manufacturing process.
