At home in the Gallery

If the National Gallery walls could talk, what stories do you think they would tell? One story you might not expect is that a family lived inside the building for 16 years. This was the family of Ralph Nicholson Wornum who worked as the Keeper at the National Gallery. Alongside his wife and children, they settled into family life in living quarters below the galleries. But what was it like living in the National Gallery?

Keeping the collection safe

After a career as an art critic and lecturer, Wornum was hired as the Keeper of the Gallery in 1855. He worked in this role for 22 years until his death in 1877. The Keeper was responsible for the administration of the collection, including supervising the cleaning, framing and display of the paintings, and writing the collection catalogue. The Keeper was also expected to live in the building, partly to help protect the collection from fire.

Family life

Wornum was married twice. First to Elizabeth Selden, from 1823 to 1860, and later to Harriet Agnes Nicholson. Throughout his life, Wornum fathered 14 children between his two marriages. It was his first wife, Elizabeth, who moved into the Gallery with their children, three of whom are recorded in a handwritten inscription in the family’s Bible, as having been born in the Gallery. But where did the Wornums actually live in the building?

Gallery documentation records that the Wornum family occupied 'ten rooms - six on the ground floor, and four on the basement floor'. However, the whole Gallery became their home. The Wornums would even sometimes host dances in the building.

Children of the Gallery

Numerous items which belonged to the Wornum family are in the Gallery’s archive. This even includes a lock of one of the children’s hair and two diaries kept by one of Wornum’s daughters, Elizabeth Helen. In 1861, when she was 13 years old, she wrote: “I did not go to church, all of us went up to the Gallery.”

Wornum had trained as an artist, attending Sass's Academy – an art school founded by British artist Henry Sass. Following in his footsteps, two of his children, Catherine Agnes and Ralph Seldon, later displayed their own works of art as part of the Royal Academy’s 1872 ‘Summer Exhibition’. It seems growing up in the Gallery, surrounded by one of the world’s great art collections, had a lasting artistic influence on the children’s lives. 

The Wornums moved out of the National Gallery in 1871. This was due to a government report stating that living in the building could create a fire risk to the paintings. Ralph Wornum continued to work as Keeper until he died in 1877. He might have been the last Keeper to live in the building but the memories of the family live on in the Gallery’s history.