Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (61 page)

In 1807, as a gesture towards the Museum’s remit as a public institution, there was an attempt at liberalizing the ticketing system, allowing ‘any person of decent appearance’ to enter on four days a week, but still limiting the daily attendance to 120. Even this little helped: in the following year, 13,000 managed to see the collection. This invasion was obviously unacceptable, and in 1810 the opening hours were returned to just three days a week. There was no question: those with snug, comfortable jobs inside wanted to keep the great unwashed out. This sounds like a retrospectively harsh judgement, but in fact it was the
opinion of many of those observing at the time, while those who ran the Museum did nothing to help their case. Before the opening in 1759, one of the trustees warned that any attempt to admit the wider public would produce

many irregularities…[which] cannot be prevented by a few librarians who will soon be insulted by such people, if they offer to control or contradict them…A great concourse of ordinary people will never be kept in order…If public days should be allowed, then it will be necessary for the Trustees to have the presence of a Committee of themselves attending, with at least two Justices of the Peace and the constables of the division of Bloomsbury…supported by a guard such a one as usually attends at the Play-House, and even after all this, Accidents must and will happen.
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This was very much of a pattern with public exhibitions for the rest of the century. When the Society of Arts lent its rooms for the first exhibition of art from the Foundling Hospital, it warned that it would ‘exclude all persons whom [it] shall think improper to be admitted, such as livery servants, foot soldiers, porters, women with children, &c.’.
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As we saw on p. 382, the first show at the Royal Academy had insisted that it was necessary to charge an admission fee so that ‘improper persons’ could be kept out, and in 1807 a visitor to the summer exhibition still shuddered at ‘the Canaille…a fry of wretches who have shoaled in (after dinner!) [that is, they ate their main meal in the middle of the day, unlike the upper classes] from all the unheard of holes in the City and suburbs’.
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This was in a reference to people who had paid a shilling entrance fee.
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There were only two art galleries in Britain that were in any real way accessible to all the public in the first part of the nineteenth century. In 1811 Sir Peter Francis Bourgeois had died and left his collection to Dulwich College, which in 1814 opened the Dulwich Gallery, the first major art gallery in London. In 1816 the 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam had bequeathed his collection to Cambridge University, the basis of the
Fitzwilliam Museum. Although more accessible, both of these were still privately owned, and run by academic institutions. Neither was bringing any closer the creation of a national collection - a national gallery. Two separate ideas about the purpose of art, and therefore what a collection was for, were battling for supremacy, and it was not at all clear which would win. First there was a group - which included most of the members of the British Institution - which saw exhibitions and museums as temples of the muses, places for the elite to enjoy themselves surrounded by their social equals, with some access for those beneath them who showed promise. A second group, which was slowly gaining ground, wanted art and museums to serve a utilitarian and educational purpose. This group of reformers saw museums as places where the working classes could be educated, where they could be socialized, where they could learn how to be a middle-class-in-waiting, first by mixing on an equal footing with their social superiors, and then also by being in the same room with great art. This sense of the improving value of art remained a constant throughout the century. In 1808 John Landseer, an engraver and the father of the painter, in his preface to
The Review of Publications of Art
reminded his readers that the fine arts were ‘copious fountains both of commercial prosperity and public happiness’.
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Eighty years later, Ruskin was certain about the influence of art on man: ‘The first function of a Museum…is to give example of perfect order and perfect elegance, in the true sense of that test word, to the disorderly and rude populace.’
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Then there was the utilitarians’ final argument: that access to art would improve standards of design and production in industry. In 1821 the founders of the Birmingham Society of Arts set out their stall: ‘The due cultivation of the Fine Arts is essential to the Prosperity of the Manufactures of this Town and Neighbourhood.’ This was not an idea that was specific to any one group; the Bristol Institution likewise promoted art exhibitions, because the arts ‘supply the manufacture with those tasteful models without which even the Steam-Engine with all its powers would only produce hideous forms and grotesque combinations.’
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A national gallery, moreover, would do all this, but somehow, in an intangible manner, because it was ‘national’ it would also do more. Landseer had continued that the fine arts ‘not only irrigate and enrich the fields of national opulence, but fertilize the still fairer fields - the paradise of national value’.
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The collector Sir George Beaumont agreed,
and added that the goal had to be free access for any of the public to a gallery owned and run by and for the nation, because, ‘By easy access to such works of art the public taste must improve…Works of high excellence pay ample interest for the money they cost. My belief is that the “Apollo”, the “Venus”, the “Laocoön”, &c. are worth thousands a year to the country which possesses them.’
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Others, more simply, felt that a national gallery, that art in general, was a pleasant recreation, a place of retreat from industrialization, and this was an important thread in the argument at a time when many of the working class could expect never to leave their smoky, grimy cities. Charles Kingsley wrote of how ‘the townsman may take his country-walk…and his hard-worn heart wanders out free, beyond the grim city-world of stone and iron, smoky chimneys, and roaring wheels, into the world of beautiful things’.
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All these motives drew together and became more urgent in 1823, when, after Angerstein’s death, Beaumont promised to donate the sixteen choicest paintings in his collection if the government would purchase Angerstein’s collection for the nation. As Beaumont’s collection included three Claudes, a Poussin, a Rubens and a Constable (and a Michelangelo tondo, which, unfortunately for the nascent National Gallery, Lady Beaumont bequeathed to the Royal Academy), and Angerstein’s included Raphael’s portrait of Julius II, Rembrandt’s
Woman Taken in Adultery
, a Sebastiano del Piombo and some more Claudes, Lord Liverpool, the prime minister, swiftly opened negotiations on behalf of the government. The collection was purchased for £57,000, with a further sum of money going to buy the lease of Angerstein’s house, in which the pictures would be shown.
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Its trustees had fully expected that the British Museum, as the sole national museum, would soon become the ‘National Gallery’ too, and for some time it appeared that this might be the case. The government had put the new National Gallery under the control of the Treasury, to be run by a ‘Committee of Gentlemen for the Superintendence of the National Gallery in Pall Mall’. That committee, however, was made up of exactly the men who were already serving as the trustees of the British Museum, and so for some time the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum acted as if it were in charge of the Angerstein and Beaumont paintings, even though these were in Pall Mall rather than Bloomsbury. It was only in 1827, with a change of government, that two non-British Museum trustees were appointed to the Committee
of Gentlemen, and the two institutions could no longer be treated as one.
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A similar raft of issues to those that vexed the British Museum continued to keep the new National Gallery’s trustees’ meetings ticking over nicely. Who was running the Gallery? was one question. For whom? and Why? were others. The first meeting of the trustees had referred to the ‘Royal National Gallery’, despite the fact that royalty had given no pictures, no money, not even the blanket aura of its approval by a royal charter. In 1834 a lack of space forced the Gallery to move further down the road until William Wilkins’s new National Gallery, begun in 1832, was completed on the north side of Trafalgar Square. This opened in 1838 - already short of space on its first day, since the government had seen the new building as the ideal opportunity to clear the Royal Academy out of Somerset House, which it wanted for its own offices. (The government gave up some of its hard-won space in Somerset House in 2001, and claims to be in the process of vacating the rest.)

As part of this move to permanent quarters, a parliamentary select committee was set up in 1835 to find ‘the best means of extending a knowledge of the Arts and of the Principles of Design among the People…[and] also to inquire into the Constitution, Management, and Effects of Institutions connected with the Arts’.
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The committee was chaired by the MP William Ewart, who was closely linked to the Benthamites and other utilitarian-minded politicians. Of the fifteen members, only three plus Ewart actually managed to attend all the meetings - many members attended none.
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Thus it was these radicals and utilitarians who ran the proceedings, and whose views were therefore to predominate. Their aims were twofold: first, to improve the taste of working classes, and by so doing, to improve the levels of design and the overall competitiveness of industry, and then ‘to look into the alleged malfeasance, corruption, and antidemocratic management of the noncommercial institutions’, unmasking the men who, as they saw it, ran the nation’s cultural institutions for their own benefits and interests, instead of for the promotion of the greater good of the majority of the population. It was, they stated, their duty to remove the ‘spirit of exclusion in this country’.
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As a result of this select committee, the British Museum was forced to open at Easter
and Whitsun - the people’s holidays, and, not coincidentally, until then the days that the Museum had chosen to close for ‘cleaning’. The librarian (the British Museum’s title for its director) Sir Henry Ellis warned, somewhat hysterically, that this would open the gates to a flood of ‘sailors from the dock-yards and girls whom they might bring with them’, but the committee was adamant, and in 1837 Easter Monday saw 23,000 visitors promenading peacefully through the galleries.
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The committee then looked at the management of the National Gallery, which in its few years of operation had not seemed to be able to make the shift from being a ‘gentleman’s collection’ to an institution that was designed to provide an education for the masses. For the first time there was a discussion of the purposes of - and the differences between - public and private collections. The keeper, William Seguier, was interviewed, and it was found that he had never been to Italy (the
ne plus ultra
of pictorial life); he had no plans to hang along historical lines, according to the new museological theories coming from Germany - indeed, he had never heard of such things - he had never thought of attaching a descriptive label beside each painting to tell the viewer the name of the artist; and he had no purchasing policy for further acquisitions to balance the collection. In contrast was a range of experts invited to appear by the select committee, who reported on the new ideas in Germany, Vienna and Paris. Baron von Klenze, from Munich, explained to the committee about the new ways of hanging pictures in groups according to the schools of art and their dates, rather than by subject or just aesthetic whim. He then spoke about labelling, fireproofing, heating and ‘scientifically researched lighting and colour schemes’. Gustav Friedrich Waagen, the director of the Royal Gallery in Berlin, gave similar testimony, and further suggested that, while the ‘Renaissance art from the time of Raphael’ so beloved of the British Institution and its followers ‘would form the best taste’, at the same time ‘Raphael’s fifteenth-century Italian predecessors were also necessary, as were representative works from earlier times’.
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In other words, an educational and art-historical programme needed to be established, instead of purchasing more paintings simply because they were pretty.

The old guard fought back: in 1845 the board of trustees unilaterally took the responsibility for purchasing new works away from the keeper; they were, they felt, much better qualified. In a select committee in 1853,
Lord Aberdeen, a trustee, warned once more against the purchase of ‘antiquarian and medieval pictures’ (that is, anything that pre-dated Raphael), and vehemently rejected setting up a purchase fund, which might lead to what he darkly referred to as ‘rash’ acquisitions.
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Then Charles Eastlake appeared to testify before the committee. He had been the National Gallery’s keeper for four years from 1841, but had been so constantly overruled by the trustees, and rendered as powerless as every other keeper, that he had left in despair. Now he heroically faced a total of 1,156 questions from the committee, and in answering set out a plan for the professionalization of the Gallery. This included the allocation of an annual Treasury grant for purchases, together with the appointment of a director, a keeper and an agent to scout for pictures abroad. His advice was not accepted by the trustees. But in 1854 the truly amateur nature of the board became apparent when so few trustees troubled to attend that several times meetings were cancelled for lack of a quorum. This is how Gladstone, in his position as Chancellor of the Exchequer, came to supervise the purchase of sixty-four pictures from a collection in Germany. When they arrived, three-quarters of them were of such terrible quality they could not be displayed. It was rumoured that Waagen, who had testified in 1835, was to be invited to take charge. Instead, Eastlake was appointed as the first director of the National Gallery.
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