By December 1856, an NPG had been established with government funding, a well qualified secretary and keeper, George Scharf, who was then organising the great Manchester exhibition of works of art and who had been a candidate for National Gallery director the previous year. Like Eastlake, Scharf had many of the same attributes of careful and scrupulous scholarship, a meticulous concern for the documentation of works of art and an interest in establishing the new institution on properly scholarly lines.

The 1850s was also the decade of the Great Exhibition, the greatest display of artefacts from all over the world, organised in the space of 18 months in a huge glass temporary palace in Hyde Park. There was massive popular interest in seeing the wonders of the world, and it was also an extraordinary feat of management. The Great Exhibition led to the establishment of a Museum of Manufactures in Marlborough House and, in 1857, to its organisation on a much more permanent footing in South Kensington. This was secured by parliamentary funding and had an able and powerfully engaged director, Henry Cole, who, like Eastlake, had a finger in every pie of arts management. Cole began his professional career in the Public Record Office, working as an assistant to Rowland Hill in the introduction of the Penny Post. He wrote a popular guide to the National Gallery under the pseudonym Felix Summerly, edited The Journal of Design and Manufactures and, in 1849, involved himself in the Select Committee Report on the Government Schools of Design. He worked as one of the commissioners under Prince Albert in the organisation of the Great Exhibition before taking up the post of General Superintendent of the Department of Practical Art, newly established under the Board of Trade in 1852. The department administered the Schools of Design and set up "museums, by which all classes might be induced to investigate those common principles of taste which may be traced in the works of excellence of all ages".

This is also the period of the establishment of the Fine Arts Commission, set up in October 1841 under the aegis of the young Prince Albert to supervise issues of public taste and the commissioning of didactic frescoes in the recently completed Palace of Westminster. Peel described its mandate as being "composed of Members of each House of Parliament selected without reference to party distinctions, whose attention has been directed to the Cultivation of the Fine Arts, and including two or three distinguished artists". Eastlake was appointed its first secretary.

These facts are well known to historians of this period, as well as to art historians, and are closely related to the professionalisation of the study of history in the same period, about which much has been written. They are important aspects of the culture of early Victorian England. But what I am not convinced has previously been adequately thought about, or analysed, and certainly not explained, even in spite of a great deal of recent research by a group of younger, mainly Cambridge-based cultural historians, is the extreme rapidity of this transformation, the exact process of the institutionalisation of art.

In the 1820s, the management of culture consisted of not much more than the rather old-fashioned practices of the trustees and staff of the British Museum, who were in charge of a miscellaneous and eclectic set of collections which mingled antiquities with works of natural history and which was only visited by persons "of decent appearance" on three days a week. Then, suddenly, during the 1830s and 1840s, there was a much more energetic determination on the part of parliament, the crown and a small number of public officials, among them Eastlake and Cole, to bring order, system and supervision to the realm of art. It had hitherto been a free market, subject to the vagaries of public taste and the whims of private patronage, with the only public institutions of fine art being organised as an act of free enterprise by groups of private individuals, as happened in the establishment of the British Institution in 1805.