The notion that the English people were only fit to be trusted in particular places — that museums were only intended for the visits of the rich, and that those collections so calculated to improve the mind, and promote science, should only be open to men of birth and fortune, had wholly gone by.

Although there is a presumption that parliament became much less interventionist during the 1850s, less troubled by the prospect of social subversion, there does not seem to have been much reduction in the cultural activities of the legislature in the establishment of institutions of art. In 1850, another Select Committee was established to decide the fate of the Vernon Collection. Lord John Russell, as Prime Minister, pledged public funds to relocate the Royal Academy into new premises apart from the National Gallery. In 1853, parliament established yet another Select Committee, this time, "To inquire into the management of the National Gallery; also to consider what mode the collective monuments of antiquity and fine art possessed by the nation may be most securely preserved, judiciously augmented, and advantageously exhibited to the public." The Committee took evidence for four months before publishing a more than 1,000-page report. It was parliament, not the trustees, that was responsible for establishing the organisation and management of the National Gallery on a properly professional footing through the issue of a Treasury Minute in March 1855.

So, it was not just the officials who were industrious. They were under the close scrutiny of MPs who took a personal interest in all aspects of arts policy, including the conservation of paintings and — not always helpfully — the price of works of art and the arrangements for their acquisition. The institutionalisation of the arts was not a product of private initiative, but of the application of public policy to the improvement of the lives and welfare of the citizenry. No area of life was now immune from parliamentary action and MPs took a broad view of their responsibilities.

It will be evident throughout this analysis of the institutionalisation of the arts that another motivator of change was competition with, and awareness of, what was happening in Germany. Nation states were in competition in their cultural policy, as they had been on the battlefield. A cartoon published in the 1820s compared the miserable accommodation of the National Gallery with the glories of the Louvre. There was a strong awareness among intellectual leaders of the 1830s when young men inspired by the writings of Coleridge, Kant and Schlegel would go to study in the university of Heidelberg, of what was being achieved in terms of the display of art in both Munich and Berlin. Schinkel's great building for the Altes Museum on the banks of the Spree and von Klenze's purpose-built Alte Pinakothek were the models for what could be achieved through a dynamic policy towards the display of art for public benefit. Younger MPs were aware of, and inspired by, the essentially German idea that cultural institutions could provide an important symbolic value to the effectiveness of the nation state.

My final determinant — but one of which I am less confident in describing — is the culture of utilitarianism. It was the writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill that led to the belief in the improving role of art for wider purposes of public education. Parliamentarians such as William Ewart, Benjamin Hawes and Joseph Hume, the so-called Philosophical Radicals, led to the provision of public institutions of art, under the influence of utilitarian beliefs. They believed that art had a wide social, political and educational value, should be taken away from the clutches of the traditional connoisseurs and used, instead, as an instrument of social amelioration. They suggested the establishment of the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures in 1835, and introduced the bill that led to the establishment of the Fine Arts Commission and supported the Museums Act in 1845. Cole was influenced by the utilitarians and met Bentham just before his death in 1832. He knew Mill reasonably well (certainly well enough to borrow money from him), became joint proprietor of the Westminster Review in 1840 and was quite a close associate of the social reformer Edwin Chadwick. They helped to inspire Cole's belief in the need for a reform of English design. Cole cited Mill when seeking support for his programme of teaching at South Kensington describing him as "the first and most liberal of English writers on political economy":