Daejeon, July 27–31
Exhibitions have long served as sites for presenting art and articulating cultural interests. As Salons in Paris did, exhibitions shaped European and Western fine art for centuries. As these events became embedded in the cultural sphere of the Western world, they gained considerable popularity throughout the nineteenth century, with the institutionalization of public museums. Alongside the opening of museum collections, fine art exhibitions devoted to contemporary national artists played a central role in shaping cultural identity and increasingly attracted public attention. The display of living artists presented the country’s artistic production and showcased the values associated with national identity. These exhibitions were conceived as public events, yet it remains uncertain to what extent they reflected or reached the “full” public. Were these cultural events, which helped define the European cultural arena, truly accessible to everyone? And, crucially, who actually visited these exhibitions?
This paper shifts the focus from the artworks and artists on display to the attending audiences. The study of exhibition or, more broadly, museum audiences in the nineteenth century has focused more on visits than on visitors (Selwood, 2018). When focusing on visitors, scholars have relied primarily on written testimonies, as there is no systematic record of audiences. The closest type of document is visitor books (Van Rossem, 2025), though they are not consistently available across all museums and exhibitions. This study proposes examining exhibition audiences by analyzing the access information preserved in exhibition materials themselves (Candlin, 2006). For this purpose, we selected the Living Masters exhibitions (Tentoonstelling van Levende Meesters), held in the Netherlands between 1808 and 1917 (Koot & Kapelle, 2015), which were considered, at the time and later by scholars, major cultural events with substantial public attendance. The selection of these exhibitions is grounded not only in their historical relevance but also in the availability of primary documentation: the catalogues. Exhibition catalogues, published by the organizers, provide a consistent and reliable source of information that allows for systematic comparison across cases. One of the defining characteristics of exhibitions is their ephemerality. They present specific artists within a particular narrative during a limited period, and the audiences who visit them are likewise shaped by their social and historical contexts. This ephemerality is significant, as it provides insights into taste and canon formation. However, it also introduces challenges for scholarly analysis: the documents are scanned, inconsistently preserved, and highly heterogeneous in structure. Key information (e.g. prices, opening hours) appears in different locations, uses varying terminology and formatting. These inconsistencies make it difficult for scholars to systematically use catalogues to study how exhibitions functioned as public institutions. To address this gap, we adopt a data-driven approach enabling the extraction, structuring, and analysis of access conditions for the Living Masters exhibitions, approaching the catalogues as structured traces of the practical, economic, and institutional arrangements shaping access. The following sections describe our methodology and main findings.
Figure 1. Exhibition catalogues included access-related information in various locations: (a) a front page including the institution, city, year, catalogue price; (b) an introductory page revealing the opening time, entry price, lottery, memberships, and rules.
For this preliminary study, we analysed the corpus of Living Masters exhibition catalogues digitized by the RKD — Netherlands Institute for Art History. We sought the catalogues containing information related to access: pricing, opening hours, location, membership options, and entry restrictions (Fig 1). 234 unique exhibition catalogues fulfilled these criteria, constituting our corpus. We then designed an AI-assisted workflow to extract and structure the information from the catalogue, such as, exhibited artists and artworks or access data. Our process consisted of the following steps (Fig 2):
Manual validation and cross-examination: We manually verified the extracted data to correct inaccuracies. The dataset was further enriched with data from archived newspaper articles.
The pipeline performed as expected; however, the manual validation step proved crucial to ensuring accuracy. While the LLM was effective in structuring the data, a human validation step remained necessary to correct inconsistencies and ensure the reliability of the final dataset. This pipeline is reproducible, and it will be published in detail in a separate paper. The outcome of this process is a dataset synthesizing access information of 234 exhibition catalogues published between 1813 and 1917 organized by over 70 institutions across 19 Dutch cities.
Figure 2. Data extraction pipeline across three phases: manual identification of extractable data, automated LLM-based extraction and structuring, and manual validation and statistical analysis.
After running an exploratory analysis using descriptive statistics, the results show that access to the Living Masters exhibitions was shaped by intersecting geographic, temporal, economic, and gendered constraints. Though rarely explicitly exclusionary, the exhibitions produced a structurally stratified participation shaped by the social logics of nineteenth-century Dutch society.
Geography played a central role in determining access (Fig. 3). The exhibitions were concentrated in major urban centres and in the northern provinces. This pattern is not unexpected, as it reinforces long-standing centre-periphery and north-south dynamics that still shape cultural systems today. The distribution of exhibitions across cities and years reveals shifts in cultural power, showing, for example, that northern cities such as Groningen played a more prominent role than cities like Utrecht or Haarlem. This spatial unevenness also suggests that the primary publics for these exhibitions were likely residents of northern Dutch cities. Another notable feature is the cultural dominance of the Randstad, which had already begun consolidating in the early nineteenth century. Amsterdam, The Hague, and Rotterdam formed a cluster of cultural authority, while Groningen emerged as a separate northern centre of influence. On the other hand, the southern provinces hosted few exhibitions, resulting in limited opportunities for local audiences to participate.
For anyone living outside major centres, attending an exhibition required substantial effort: longer journeys, higher travel costs, and time away from work. Access was further shaped by the uneven length of the exhibitions themselves. Amsterdam’s exhibitions were generally open for around seventy days, whereas cities like Arnhem offered roughly forty-five days on average. Additionally, many exhibitions closed on Sundays, the only viable visiting day for most working people and for visitors travelling from other cities. In a few instances, organizers also restricted entry on certain days according to a visitor’s place of residence, making geography an explicit condition for participation.
Figure 3. Frequency of exhibitions per city over time (1815–1920), showing the geographical distribution and regularity of exhibition activity across Dutch cities
Economic factors also stratified participation, operating through two parallel systems: ticket fees and membership models. At least 137 exhibitions across 12 cities offered memberships providing reduced admission costs, early access, or enhanced lottery privileges, allowing more frequent and meaningful access to wealthier visitors. Membership prices typically ranged from 1-2 guilders, though in cities such as Amsterdam and The Hague, they could reach 5-10 guilders. Some exhibitions also offered discounted rates for long-term members, while others restricted membership eligibility altogether; in The Hague, for instance, memberships were sometimes available only to city residents, further underscoring their exclusivity. For non-members, admission fees generally ranged between 10 and 30 cents until about 1880, after which some exhibitions introduced substantial increases. Although modest in contemporary terms, these fees represented a significant share of a nineteenth-century worker’s daily wage, especially when travel, catalogues, and lost income are taken into account. Admission prices were also frequently higher in smaller cities, limiting access in places where exhibitions were already scarce.
Gendered norms introduced an additional layer of constraint. Certain free-entry arrangements allowed a man who purchased a ticket to bring one woman at no additional cost, a privilege not extended to unaccompanied women or to accompanying men. Such practices curtailed women’s autonomous participation. At the same time, some exhibitions offered reduced membership fees specifically for women, revealing an ambivalent logic in which gender functioned both as a mechanism of restriction and as a selective tool of inclusion.
Overall, access to the Living Masters exhibitions was shaped by intersecting geographic, temporal, economic, and gendered constraints that, while rarely explicit, produced a stratified public. Attendance depended on proximity to major cities, the ability to travel and forgo work, the capacity to pay admission or membership fees, and one’s position within gendered access structures. These conditions privileged urban, mobile, and wealthier visitors, while limiting participation for those outside these categories. The exhibitions, therefore, functioned not as universally open cultural spaces but as spaces structured by the social hierarchies of nineteenth-century Dutch society.
This exploratory study leads to two main conclusions: one methodological and one related to access and the public of the Dutch living masters exhibitions. Methodologically, we demonstrate the viability of a workflow that automates the transformation of textual catalogue material into structured tabular data. The use of LLMs was essential for unlocking rich but previously unstructured data, enabling a data-driven analysis of these exhibitions, information that was previously overseen and not digitized or structured. The first exploratory analysis of the Living Masters exhibitions reveals, through empirical evidence, the broader cultural logics and dynamics that shaped Western art worlds. These patterns show how visibility and cultural participation were mediated by social class, gender, and geography, conditions that continue to inform the Dutch cultural landscape today. This paper not only explores audiences in these Dutch exhibitions, which have never been studied before from a macro perspective, but also highlights the importance of extracting, digitizing, and structuring information from catalogues beyond artists, artworks, curators, or lenders.
Part of this project has been funded by the Proyecto del Plan Nacional de I+D+i del Ministerio de Ciencia Innovación y Universidades for the project "Estudio e interpretación del dominio de las exposiciones artísticas como sistema cultural complejo mediante analítica de datos y procesamiento del lenguaje natural" (PID2021-125037NB-I00).