Architectures of display at the National Gallery

This paper examines architectural and art historical projects associated with the National Gallery after the mid-nineteenth century, the articulation and presentation of art history in displays at the gallery and issues surrounding the practices of reconstructing displays, both in historiographical and physical terms. It pursues these themes by looking at the concerns of mid-nineteenth-century connoisseurship and considering the extent to which they guided Edward Middleton Barry's 1876 north-east extension and its display of Italian paintings. The key finding in this context is that this display only partially reflected the connoisseurial attitudes to art history which were developed in contemporary museological debates; this is a result of various political and practical circumstances which complicated the process of putting museological theory into practice. This analysis is accompanied by a discussion of some historiographical and methodological issues surrounding reconstructions and understandings of historical displays, and a consideration of how this bears on the recent and continuing physical ‘restoration’ of historic display spaces (for example at the National Gallery itself).

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Articulation (sociology) · Context (archaeology) · Historiography · Painting · Political science · Politics · Presentation (obstetrics) · Visual arts · Historical Art and Culture Studies · History · Law · Museums and Cultural Heritage · Photography and Visual Culture

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• A Contrast in Styles at the Office of Works. Layard and Ayrton

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• The South Kensington Museum in context

  Open Access•Bruce Robertson•Museum and Society•2015

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