ABSTRACT
The public–the public, and none but the public–shall have a National Gallery (NG), a Royal Academy–demand especial legislation, committees of taste, to tell this public what it wants, which it ought to know very well of itself, if the said public hath any individual bodily existence. This chapter searches for a way of describing the possibility of aligning institutional identity and critical commentary; or a way of delineating how it was possible to possess this thing, the NG, in the multiple registers of 'Nation', 'State', 'People' and 'Culture'. Shadowing the institutional ascendancy of the historicist model, they find the formation of a management discourse which examined the habits, actions and expressions of visitors inside the NG, and the environmental consequences of mass assembly with regard to the health of the collection. Culture, hygiene and chemistry, aligned in this institutional optic which looked at the look of the visitor personified in the figure of Sir Michael Faraday.
