sides of windows rather than in more prominent positions. Preparatory sketches were sometimes
displayed alongside finished works. Royal portraits were mounted in elaborate frames and sometimes set
on a dais with a canopy. This set them apart from the thinner frames chosen for most works due in part to
considerations of space. The juxtaposition of works was a very sensitive issue. If a work was placed next
to another much worse or better than it, there could be significant implications for its critical reception.
The job of picturehanger (carried out for some years by Chardin) therefore carried some status and
could attract requests for favors.
Sculptures at Royal Academy exhibitions were at times displayed in a dark basement, perhaps alongside
architectural drawings, or in a relatively dark lifedrawing room (Yarrington, 2001, 173–175). At
Somerset House, some small waxes and medallions were displayed around the fireplace in the Great
Room, almost to add a decorative flourish to the more significant works on display. The spot above the
fireplace itself was reserved for works by senior academicians (Sunderland and Solkin, 2001, 25). At the
Salons, smaller sculptures were sometimes displayed on tables in the main exhibition spaces but the
larger ones were displayed in courtyards or in artists’ own studios.
Those who hung eighteenthcentury exhibitions also aspired to specific aesthetic effects. Paintings were
often hung in symmetrical arrangements, with, for example, sitters’ poses mirroring one another. There
was often a central “triptych” of important works. Another consideration was the display of decorative
works. Many rococo paintings had been devised for specific settings; for example, to sit within a
decorative overdoor panel or a gilded wall frame. From the 1740s and 1750s, these works were
removed from any decorative framing or context for display at exhibitions (Scott, 1995, 253). Such
considerations are very important in museology in our own times, as are the overriding principles
driving the ordering and categorization of exhibits. The Grande Galérie was the principal exhibition
space used at the Louvre when it became a public museum. Works on display included old master works
from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and some antique sculptures (bronzes and busts). Works from
different schools of painting were often mixed together in contemporary exhibitions, in order to facilitate
connoisseurial comparisons and debate. In 1794, a conscious decision was taken at the Louvre to rehang
works chronologically and according to national schools. A similar and probably influential hanging
principle had been used at the Imperial Gallery in Vienna in the 1770s and 1780s. The Louvre was
popular with people from all ranks of society and was renamed in 1797, after a period of closure for
repairs, the Muséum Central des Arts. It then mounted specialist exhibitions, for example, of old master
drawings, or of the works looted by Napoleon Bonaparte (Consul 1802–1804; Emperor of France 1804–
1814/15) in Italy. The principle of grouping and displaying works according to chronology and national
schools remained dominant for some considerable time after that and was seriously challenged only in the
later twentieth century. In late eighteenthcentury museum displays opportunities were often seized, in a
context of international political conflicts, to express national pride and achievements.
The burgeoning exhibition culture of the eighteenth century brought a new emphasis to the interaction of
art with its public. Spectators themselves became part of the “spectacle” of plays and exhibitions, as part
of a discourse of fashion and sociability that accompanied one’s presence at such events (Craske, 1997,
190). In other exhibition settings, such as the Foundling Hospital in London, some of the historical works
on display invited viewers to express the kinds of moral or charitable feeling valued from the 1760s
onwards (Solkin, 1993, 173). Exhibition culture brought with it an increasing awareness of the role of
subjective and shared values in the interpretation and reception of works of art. It was also highly
regulated, as the “personal” act of viewing was constantly mediated by a range of devices, from
exhibition catalogues to the publication in the press and elsewhere of prints representing exhibition
crowds. Prints of exhibitions and their visitors provided a kind of social index of viewers, suggesting (or
often lampooning) their ways of behaving (Matheson, 2001, 39–42). Richard Newton (1777–1798) was