The senses at the National Gallery: art as sensory recreation and regulation in Victorian England

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn 1850, the keeper of the National Gallery in London described the museum as being frequented by “school boys eating bread and cheese” and country folk who “drew their chairs round and sat down, and seemed to make themselves very comfortable”. As for the pictures on the walls, these were smeared with the fingerprints of inquiring gallery-goers. The tension between the National Gallery as an unfussy place of recreation, in which visitors could enjoy themselves at their ease, and as a prim site of regulation, in which visitors must learn to exercise tight control over their behavior, played itself out in elite nineteenth-century debates over the role of the Gallery as a public space. This article examines nineteenth-century representations of the ideal sensory role of the National Gallery and its problematic actual sensory life. This leads into a discussion of the ways in which the National Gallery and other public art institutions were imagined to function as the soft fingertips of the long arm of the law, transforming social disorder into social order and destructive sensuality into compliant sensitivity.