Andrea Geddes Poole has written an engaging, thoroughly researched, persuasive, and surprisingly passionate history of the inner workings of four national arts institutions (the National Gallery, Wallace Collection, National Portrait Gallery, and Tate Gallery). She approaches this subject in order to assess whether the preponderance of landed aristocrats on the institutions’ boards of trustees in fact represented real cultural power. In ultimately answering in the negative, she contributes to the long debate over the rise of the middle class, the corresponding decline of the aristocracy, professionals’ challenge to older elites, and the staying power of England’s traditional social system. However, while the book succeeds in addressing her (relatively narrow) inquiry, her argument would have benefited from broader contextualization and analysis, particularly regarding the very subject of her work, the changing meaning and status of art during this contentious period. Thus, the book has considerable strengths, but it misses some key opportunities to make some bigger, and perhaps more compelling, connections between institutional development and broader cultural and social history.

Poole’s starting point is “the debate over the decline of the aristocracy and the discussions of tensions between amateurs and professionals” (3). Poole makes it clear that she is interested in arts institutions inasmuch as they offer insight into aristocrats’ attempts to maintain “cultural, rather than economic, social, or political power” (8). Her key theoretical tool is the concept of “cultural capital,” utilizing Pierre Bourdieu’s formulation. Bourdieu described the difference between cultural capital casually “absorbed” by the leisured classes and that laboriously acquired through educational institutions and study. Poole’s work is persuasive that the differences between aristocratic trustees and their directors and gallery staff came about largely around, as she puts it, the “incendiary issue of artistic merit” (189, 217), and that these aesthetic decisions were fraught, not necessarily because of differences in socioeconomic class but because of differing types of cultural capital. Thus, most aristocrats believed their form of amateur cultural capital—knowledge developed through family art collections, Continental tours, and other, generally informal means—to be equal or even superior to that of the artists and arts professionals appointed as gallery directors. Much of the book details the resulting, striking differences among the various institutions in her study: the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection, where directors and boards had to decide questions of acquisitions or the arrangement of the collection, became nests of vipers; in contrast, the National Portrait Gallery, whose board had to decide on matters of historical importance, rather than aesthetics, remained notably collegial. In the wake of the Chantrey scandal, the Tate board ran remarkably smoothly precisely because acquisition decisions were delegated to a separate committee, and power within the board was equally divided among artists, aristocratic representatives from the National Gallery, gallery directors, and independent trustees (189).

In this minute documentation of relations between aristocratic boards and their artist or arts-administrator directors, Poole reveals a vibrant site of cultural struggle. She has identified wonderful sources, using memoirs and letters particularly well, and conducted assiduous research (the endnotes offer a wealth of detail). She often shows a charming partisanship in her vivid accounts of the characters involved, taking sides in long-silent board meetings, private correspondence, and memoranda. She has a real feeling for the social milieux she describes and the nuances of deference and approach that made the difference between, for example, the contentious directorship of Sir Charles Holroyd at the National Gallery and the more successful tenures of Sir Kenneth Clark at the same institution or D. S. MacColl at the Wallace Collection. She paints compelling portraits of her characters, mining sources to give us access to the astounding drama and emotion surrounding long-standing personal conflicts (see, e.g., her description of Viscount Lee of Fareham [153–54]). Ultimately, she presents convincing evidence that despite aristocrats’ domination of these boards of trustees during the period 1890–1939, they ultimately lost legitimacy as cultural stewards in the eyes of the Treasury, arts professionals, and the public. She also shows the extent to which “new men” like Samuel Courtauld, Henry Tate, and Joseph Duveen did not simply “assimilate” into a cultural elite but reshaped it in profound ways through their philanthropy and very different visions of cultural stewardship.

It is precisely because Poole is so convincing that the central issue of contention was the judgment of art—fueling the conflict between different kinds of cultural capital—that her silence on wider artistic and cultural developments is disappointing. She often treats 1890–1939, a period of drastic cultural and social change, without clear distinctions between decades and without mentioning changing social perceptions of art, of government support for culture, or of aesthetics. What were these institutions for? Did their purposes change over time? How did these cultural stewards understand the purpose and meaning of art or of a national collection of art? For instance, it is striking that some aristocrats refused to purchase works for the National Gallery because of their “ugliness” (82), a fascinating idea that one wishes she had pursued. Similarly, the wider social and economic context would have helped her discussion of the furor over the trustees’ perceived mistreatment of their gallery directors in 1932 (175–78).

One of the strongest chapters shows how these institutional debates became public with the 1909 near-loss to the nation of Hans Holbein’s painting Christina, Duchess of Milan (1538). That chapter, another version of which previously appeared in Nineteenth-Century Studies, brings a welcome dose of wider context to the work as a whole. It is very difficult to achieve a balance between the internal logic of bureaucracies and the wider cultural changes that both affected these at the time and give them meaning and interest to us now. Overall, this is a substantial contribution to the study of the aristocracy and of relations between professionals and amateurs; Poole aimed at precisely these questions and succeeded in addressing them. One simply wishes she had widened her scope to include a broader interpretation and contextualization of her findings.