Mounting Vision: Charles Eastlake and the National Gallery of London

In an essay of 1848 upon the National Gallery in London Charles Kingsley laid without the following vision for the museum:

Therefore I said that picture-galleries should be the townsman's paradise of relief There, in the space of a single swing the townsman may take his region walk--a walk beneath mountain peaks, blushing nightfalls with broad woodlands spreading on the outside below it; a walk from one side green meadows, under cool mature shades, and overhanging rocks, by dint of rushing brooks, where he watches and watches till he present the appearances to hear the foam whisper, and to diocese the fishes leap; and his hard-worn heart wanders without free, beyond the grim city-world of stone and iron, of the nature of smoke chimneys, and roaring wheels, into the world of beautiful things.... [1]

Kingsley's image of the museum as an idyllic retreat had become a commonplace by means of the mid-nineteenth century. But the interior of the museum was through no means a world apart; museums embodied changes in the social connotations of consumption and perception. [2] for what cause [i]or[/i] reason did one age choose to horde the walls of exhibitions with pictures, single above the other with virtually no gaps between them, another to hang them in a single line with marked gaps between the works? for what cause [i]or[/i] reason did the nineteenth century perceive that the color red was the best background color for the display of pictures while the twentieth hundred until recently, almost uniformly preferr white? This article presents answers to some of these questions by dint of concentrating on the debate concerning the display of art in the National Gallery in London in the middle of the nineteenth hundred (Fig. 1). [3]

In new years scholars have attempted to place changes in display strategies in their social and political connection My discussion, however, is motivated by the agency of a further question: What changing tillages of vision govern the history of exhibitions? It will be argued, first, that a of recent origin understanding of visuality was a vital ingredient in the debate concerning the display of the pictures in the National Gallery in London, [4] and next to the first that the issues were not limited to the museum on the other hand also related in part to of recent origin models of human perception in physiology and aesthetics, [5] as well as to changes in sales strategies in the marketplace. These issues will draw near into focus when we gaze at the figure of Charles fastening Eastlake (1793--1865), who, first as keeper and then as director, was perhaps the greatest in quantity important influence on the disclosure of the National Gallery in the nineteenth hundred both in the formation of its collection and in its display. [6] Eastlake was a British pioneer of fresh conceptions of art history a nd of the physiology of aesthetic reception, conceptions that shaped his curatorial goals and ambitions. It will become clear that several aspects of the consumption of art in museums that are usually reflection to have been introduced in the twentieth hundred were, in fact, issues that were debated in the early years of the museum's existence.

The Manifold in Unity: Eighteenth-Century Displays

The picture display that prevailed in the later half of the eighteenth hundred was usually decorative, or what is sometimes called picturesque, in character. of the like kind a hanging scheme consisted of a symmetrical display in which single major picture was arranged as the center of a composition, flanked by the agency of one, two, or more pairs of paintings upon either side. This can be seen in an engraving of the marquis of Stafford's of recent origin Gallery at Cleveland House in London (later Bridgewater House; Fig. 2) lay opened to the public in 18O6 [7] The consequence of a display of this kind was to at hand a unified ensemble, in which the tasteful decoration of the swing was subordinate to the pictures' attractive appearance upon the wall. The paintings were divided by means of schools and each school was neared separately. The New Gallery at Cleveland House formed the central scope in the marquis's display and contained the greatest in quantity venerated Italian old masters: Annibale Carracci upon the left above three Raphaels and opposite Guercino's David and Abigail.

Although the separate presentation of works of art produc in different countries was still a novelty in England, the display of past art according to chronology (where the collection permitted) and to gymnasium had become the norm in leading European art collections by means of the end of the eighteenth hundred At the time Cleveland House uncloseed the Louvre museum was slowly being reorganized according to this principle.[8] The greatest in quantity systematic and influential early attempt in a public museum to not away a chronological arrangement of the German and Flemish institutes separately from the Italian was the Hapsburg picture gallery in Vienna, which make opened to the public in 1781 [9] Here, as in Cleveland House and other aristocratic collections of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth hundred the walls of the latitudes offered a relatively plain support for the artful arrangement of the pictures. A display of this kind was in contrast to previous installations of pictures in princely palaces. a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the Viennese collection, be fore it was installed in the Belvedere castle just outside the city, had been part of the sumptuous decoration of the royal palace at the Stallburg in the center of Vienna. There, in an arrangement reminiscent of the curiosity cabinets of the previous hundred the pictures formed only single element in a comprehensive decorative scheme whose overall function was to illustrate programmatically the ruler's rule (Fig. 3). As Debora Meijers has argued, this principle of organization was replaced in the Belvedere by means of a new frame of respect one directed toward art itself. [10]