To begin with, the governing aesthetic for acquisitions was heavily Italophile. As Conlin points out, the high-art craze of the 1880s gave Botticelli ‘an almost kabbalistic power among self-described aesthetes’. Dutch masters received a somewhat grudging admittance at first, and nobody seems to have known enough about Spaniards such as Velazquez and Zurbaran to beef up their meagre representation before their saleroom prices became stratospheric. As for the French Impressionists, their presence in the gallery remained contentious from 1917, when Maynard Keynes and Lord Curzon joined forces to acquire Manet’s ‘Execution of Maximilian’ and an innocuous Gauguin, ‘Pot de Fleurs’, to 1960, when Philip Hendy, one of the gallery’s more controversial directors, was still finding it necessary to justify the purchase of a Cézanne as a matter of national significance.

To whom did the whole place really belong? Art historians and connoisseurs loathed Hendy for his ‘socialistic’ efforts at making it accessible with evening openings, a new restaurant and jazzy Underground posters. They have scarcely been more charitable towards attempts by subsequent directors at seeing off assaults from Whitehall philistines clamorous for ‘inclusive outreach’, or the kind of generic anti-elitism spawned by John Berger’s modishly Marxist 1972 TV series Ways of Seeing.

Conlin’s narrative features several heroes, among them Victorian collector-director Charles Eastlake and his remarkable wife Elizabeth, and a few spoilers, such as Hendy’s successor Michael Levey, the memory of whose dismal mise-en-scène of hessian-clad walls, lowered ceilings and fussy little daises can still induce a shudder. Not the least fascinating aspect of The Nation’s Mantelpiece, a wise, funny and massively informative survey, is the gallery’s gift for surviving mediocrity and institutional pigheadedness, serenely committed to its original purpose of improving and entertaining us while demanding nothing in return. Conlin’s book is both a tribute to this endurance and, by implication, a warning to politicians seeking to smother the place with dogma or starve its endeavours by meanness and indifference. It is, as a schoolboy quoted on the final page declares, ‘Our Gallery’, but is our love enough to protect it?

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