Mounting vision: Charles Eastlake and the National Gallery of London (Victorian museums)

This article brings together the social history of art collections and the history of vision in a discussion of the debates surrounding the National Gallery of London's display of art in the nineteenth-century. It is argues that behind the ideas of Charles Eastlake regarding the arrangement of the National Gallery, lay a new understanding of visuality, which corresponded to contemporary developments in commercial art exhibitions and the increasing attention of physiologists to subjective aspects of perception. Simultaneously, a new notion of individuality arrived via the German Romantic movement, which led to a new conception of art's value and history