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.

中文翻译：

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国家美术馆的感官：维多利亚时代英格兰作为感官娱乐和调节的艺术

摘要 1850 年，伦敦国家美术馆的馆长将博物馆描述为“吃面包和奶酪的男生”和“拉开椅子坐下，似乎让自己很舒服”的乡下人经常光顾。至于墙上的照片，上面涂满了询问画廊的人的指纹。国家美术馆作为一个简单的娱乐场所，游客可以在其中轻松自在地享受自己，而作为一个主要的监管场所，游客必须学会严格控制自己的行为，这两者之间的紧张关系在第 19 届精英阶层中发挥了作用。 -关于画廊作为公共空间的作用的世纪辩论。本文考察了 19 世纪国家美术馆理想的感官角色及其有问题的实际感官生活的表现。