Now the world of fine art, its study and practice, suddenly came within the scope of parliament to organise, finance, supervise and control. The acquisition and display of works of art became much more systematic. Works of art were studied, documented, classified and interpreted in a way that they had not been before. The teaching of art was subject to an iron discipline in a way that it had not been previously. Art was treated as a didactic instrument to teach the public about British history. Throughout the British Isles and not just in London, there was a belief that art could be managed in the same way as other areas of the public realm.

So then the question is: why did this happen?

First, it is impossible to ignore the role of a small group of highly energetic, well-trained individuals who saw themselves as public servants in a way that did not, I think, exist in the previous generation. Charles Eastlake was trained at the Royal Academy Schools in the early part of the century, but he then lived in Rome during the 1820s, where he came into contact with German artists and art historians. He appears to have absorbed some of the intellectual and moral discipline of his German friends, including J. D. Passavant who wrote a biography of Raphael and Gustav Waagen, the art historian who was appointed director of the Altes Museum in 1832. As a result of living in Italy and travelling on the Continent, Eastlake approached works of art, not simply aesthetically, to be appreciated visually, but as having a history that was susceptible to intellectual study and analysis. In 1840, he published a translation of Goethe's Theory of Colours. In 1842, he published a translation of Franz Kugler's The Italian Schools of Painting. In 1847, he published his magisterial Materials for a History of Oil Painting, which is still in print for the information it supplies about the early history of the materials and techniques of painting, and the following year he published a compilation of articles under the title Contributions to the Literature of the Fine Arts. He was a scholar as well as a public official, highly industrious and productive in publishing work alongside his public duties, a model of the high-minded Victorian public servant.

Let us think now about the characteristics of Henry Cole. Educated at Christ's Hospital, he entered public service aged 15 as an assistant to Francis Palgrave, the early student of public records and who was such a significant figure in the establishment of the Public Record Office. Cole seems to have inherited from Palgrave some of his powerful determination to reform public organisations, including, in Cole's case, the postal service, the system of art school teaching, the Royal Society of Arts and the ways in which manufactures and public taste could be improved by their systematic display, first in Marlborough House and, from 1857 onwards, much more ambitiously in the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A). Both Palgrave and Cole, if faced by obstacles, were capable of being pretty bruising in the ways in which they treated colleagues — that was the way they got things done.

George Scharf, who was the key figure in the foundation of the National Portrait Gallery, was perhaps a slightly less bullish public servant. But the range of his intellectual interests was still fairly formidable. He travelled in the 1840s as the official artist on expeditions to study antiquities in Asia Minor and compiled a catalogue of the pictures owned by the Society of Antiquaries. He helped organise the Greek, Roman and Pompeian courts when the Crystal Palace moved to Sydenham, and was appointed as the secretary to the great Art Treasures Exhibition at Manchester. The same year, he became secretary to the NPG trustees when it was established in 1857 in a small, private house in Great George Street, close to the Houses of Parliament.

We have got used in recent years to the idea of the professional bureaucrat as a term of abuse, as if all bureaucrats are intellectually second-rate, interested only in the perpetuation of systems of existing management and not in innovation. But these art bureaucrats of early Victorian England were something else: tirelessly hard-working, writing books in the morning, serving on committees in the afternoon, endlessly networking and socialising in the evening, with a dedicated sense of mission to create and reform institutions of art for the educational benefit of a broad public. And I certainly do not think it is accidental that their activities, their sense of moral purpose, coincided with the reform of the civil service itself, the sweeping away of systems of patronage through the Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854. The tidying of procedures, the organisation of systems of public management and the idea of public duty were not confined to art history.