The Town House as Gallery of Art

Abstract

The aim of this article is to study the accumulation and display of paintings in great London houses, from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth. It looks at the extent to which paintings were kept in London, rather than country, houses; and it considers how works of art were allocated to town or to country mansions, and whether certain types of family were more prone to embellish their town houses in this way than others. The article also looks at the rooms in which paintings were kept, especially the picture gallery. And since at certain periods London houses did serve as the forerunners of museums of fine art, the attitude of owners to the problem of the public deserves attention. It was inconceivable that even the most public-spirited nobleman would admit to his palace the dirty and dangerous mob of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whose theoretical right of admission even to the publicly-owned British Museum was so effectively curtailed; but even unknown members of the middle classes were given access to most town houses, until their decline after the First World War, only occasionally and with general reluctance.