Growl from gallery guard as we admired art illustrates need for clarity

Iwent to the National Gallery on the first day I could after it reopened earlier this month, eager for artistic sustenance after months of Covidinduced famine. I took Constance, my nine-year-old daughter, thinking now was the prime opportunity to introduce her to the joys of Rembrandt et al without tourist crowds in the way.

At first, I thought it was the right decision. Our greatest temple of art had barely another human wandering its halls. The security guards and other staff were delightfully welcoming but in no way obscured the Holbeins and Caravaggios. We had the Rembrandt room entirely to ourselves.

But everything went wrong when we got to Titian’s “poesies”. A tall, skinny, crow-like man wearing a black mask lurched well within two metres of our periphery just as we’d sat down on a bench.

“Is there a reason for that?” he spat (into his mask). I thought he had a problem with us sitting down.

“How do you mean,” I asked. “Masks,” he growled.

Constance and I weren’t wearing them. I’d checked with the guard on arrival and she’d said that it was optional, if “encouraged”. I conveyed this to the man, who had no riposte and stalked off to glare at us from Perseus and Andromeda. However, the damage was done.

“Why was the man so cross,” asked Constance in front of the Tintorettos. “That man was really quite nasty wasn’t he,” she said, as we peered at a De Hooch. I said some people just start off the day with a bit of horrid to get out, and the mask thing was only an excuse. “Do you think the man might be cheered up by a yo-yo,” she asked in the shop. We bought a yo-yo – to cheer up Constance.

The fact is that the febrile atmosphere created by this new national anxiety – should you or shouldn’t you wear a mask? – is not the tiniest bit conducive to artistic contemplation. I’ve witnessed mask rage in other contexts (public transport, shops) but this incident was much more of a jolt to my state of mind.

Perhaps it sounds like a first-world problem. The threat of dying by Covid-19 should obviously take precedence over any self-indulgent desire to think about beauty, meaning and how past geniuses saw the world. But the two-metre rule was easy to observe during our visit. The rooms of paintings were thrilling to see, and easier to enjoy than during any other point in my lifetime, yet the masked vigilante scared my child so much he ended our fun right there.

It seems galleries are places where there needs not only to be super-clear rules (at the moment, some institutions are making masks compulsory, others not) but also a deliberate allaying of fears. If entry numbers are so restricted that the two-metre rule is easily enforced, as was the case for us, there’s no need for people to breathe into a stuffy piece of cloth and steam up their glasses while they’re there.

It should be said that the National Gallery’s advice – wear a mask if you like – was eminently sane. It’s just that people aren’t. It apparently also needed to be explained that standing in front of Renaissance art does not increase your susceptibility to disease.

There needs to be a clarification that returning to doing the nice things we were able to do before the advent of coronavirus should not be understood as taking up an invitation to some sort of conflict session. The joy that art brings has to be allowed to win out over irrational paranoia.

‘The febrile atmosphere created by this national anxiety is not conducive to artistic contemplation’