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

ABSTRACT

In 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Senses
• touch
• museums
• National Gallery
• Victorian England

Acknowledgments

The research on which this article is based was funded by two grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada: “The Hands-On Museum” and “Law and the Regulation of the Senses”. I wish to thank Sheryl Hamilton for her insightful comments and for her invitation to contribute to this special issue, and the reviewers appointed by the Journal for their support and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Constance Classen

Constance Classen is a cultural historian specializing in the history of the senses. She is the author of The Museum of the Senses: Experiencing Art and Collections (2017) and The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (2012), along with numerous other works. She is also the general editor of the six-volume Cultural History of the Senses from Bloomsbury (2014), and the editor of The Book of Touch (2005). She is currently a research associate on several international projects investigating the cultural life of the senses.