The well-known Birmingham based medallist Thomas Ottley struck the prize medal for the 1866 Yorkshire Fine Art and Industrial Exhibition, as has been the case for many national and international exhibitions beforehand.

However, the design was executed with more of a sense of local pride, by a obscure York artist named John Bell.

The design for the medal is extremely accomplished and displays homage to some of York’s artistic heritage. The most significant representations are the monoliths at either side bearing the profiles of the two artists William Etty and John Flaxman, who during the nineteenth century were adopted as the spiritual fathers of all painting and sculpture practiced within the city.

Other figures around the perimeter represent the Muses of History, Music and Medicine, of which the large exhibition would have been promoting York’s strong cultivation.

Another interesting inclusion is the Muse of Architecture, at about 11 o’clock, who holds a tablet showing the elevation and floor plan of the temporary structure erected to house the exhibition in the grounds of Bootham Asylum.

The reverse displays a wreath of the White Rose of York, joined at the bottom by the Civic and Ecclesiastical coats of arms.

With a name typically hard to research, much of Bell’s work is attributed speculatively and tentatively. John Ward Knowles, the city’s most fervent cultural chronicler during the nineteenth century, describes Bell as a painter of large-scale landscape works, of which there are a number of examples in York Art Gallery’s collection. Knowles also describes Bell as being involved in the arrangement of the pictures in the Fine Art gallery of the exhibition.

That this is the same John Bell as the medal’s designer seems likely. At around the time of the conception of the 1866 Exhibition, the local press reports of the growing popularity of the painter’s works.

In 1864 a landscape work by Bell entitled The Lake at Orta travelled to Leeds to go on display at the Music Hall on Albion Street to highly favourable reviews.

The Leeds Intelligencer wrote:

“A mist is rolling up the distant gorge, and the exquisite tinges of delicate colour, and the clever perspective of this portion of the picture would alone stamp the painter as an artist of rare genius”

It seems logical that an artist with a growing reputation yet an evident fidelity to the advancement of his town’s arts is chosen to embellish the award-winning arts and manufactures at such a significant display of local and civic pride.