The Public Art Museum in Nineteenth Century Britain: The Development of the National Gallery (review)

Pity the National Gallery in its formative years. While the British Museum and its heterogeneous holdings have fascinated visitors from that institution's early days, the nation's premiere site for the display of paintings was from birth an institutional ugly duckling subject to relentless and manifold criticisms. The building that housed it was never satisfactory—whether it was Sir John Julius Angerstein's home in Pall Mall, where the collection was first displayed, or the structure William Wilkins designed for Trafalgar Square, already cramped by the presence of the Royal Academy when it opened in 1838. Worse, the institution's holdings were clearly inadequate and poorly displayed, especially when compared to the treasures visible in foreign galleries and the careful forms of exhibition that developed on the Continent along with the field of art history itself.

The study of museums, which received an important impetus in the 1980s from the critique of institutions that was so important a part of critical theory, has reached a new level of maturity—a stage in which the careful analysis of the documents of institutional and architectural history combines with an appreciation of the force of historical contingency to carry discussion beyond well-worn critiques of power. This development is particularly important in the case of Britain, where high culture has seldom had the direct relation to power it has enjoyed on the Continent. After all, while revolutionary Frenchmen opened Louis XVI's collection to the public in what is sometimes taken to be the founding moment of the modern museum, the Puritans, by contrast, simply sold Charles II's magnificent art collection to the highest bidder, a loss to largely foreign collections from which it would take centuries to recover.

Christopher Whitehead has written a useful and careful account of the National Gallery at a crucial phase in its development, the awkward stage when it was beginning to move from an unloved and extremely modest institution to what was to become one of the world's great museums. The kind of meticulously-researched work Whitehead has carried out in his study can seem less glamorous than broad theorizing, but it has the virtue of being responsible, humane, and liable to offer important insights into historical and contemporary developments.

Shame, embarrassment, and a general sense of missed opportunities characterize writings on the National Gallery through the first decades of its existence. The Gallery's very location became a matter of concern by the middle of the century. Trafalgar Square, originally praised for its accessibility to all classes, came to be seen as in fact all-too central, and therefore tending to subject the canvases on the wall of the Gallery to the degrading effects of pollution and even of the effluvium produced by unwashed bodies entering the structure (sometimes not in search of culture, but merely looking to get out of the rain). The "site question"—that recurrent debate about moving the Gallery to a more salubrious because less central site—that preoccupied parliamentary committees over decades was motivated as much by developing concerns about preservation as by uncertainty as to the proper place of the public in the museum. The issue arguably found its resolution not in the translation of the Gallery, but in the founding of the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert), an event Whitehead rightly associates with the National Gallery site debate. This instance suggests something of the complexity of Whitehead's project, for to write the history of the National Gallery at this level is also to engage the story of important rival institutions.

If one challenge for the student is the intertwined history of institutions, another is the marked importance of failed ventures. Whitehead identifies (following the pioneering work of Francis Haskell) the significance of the massive report produced by the Select Committee on the National Gallery in 1853. A compendium of advanced museological...