Behind the scenes: the process of updating a museum gallery

How do you tell when a gallery is getting old? Do the displays look tired? Have some of the objects been removed? Do the texts on the walls reflect ways of thinking that have been questioned? Are relevant voices and perspectives omitted?  

Being alert to these signs is a significant part of our role as curators, but making improvements often takes time and requires careful thought and consultation.  

Historically, much of this behind-the-scenes work has gone unseen, but an increasing number of museums are now looking to bring greater transparency to the process of reviewing and rethinking displays.  

In that spirit, this article shines a light on our ongoing work to update one of the rooms in the Queen’s House, shares the questions that we are asking ourselves and introduces some of our collaborators on the project.  

The Enlightenment Views room is on the first floor of the Queen’s House, overlooking Greenwich Park. Since 2016, it has showcased selected landscapes and portraits from our extensive collections of eighteenth-century British art. 

The introductory text panel, written in 2016, describes the room as a display of ‘Enlightenment Views’. It states:

‘To enlighten’ means ‘to give greater knowledge and understanding’. The term ‘Age of Enlightenment’ describes an intellectual movement in eighteenth-century Europe. It highlights the era’s growing emphasis on reason, scientific thought, religious tolerance and individual liberty.  

Yet the same period was also characterised by colonial violence, exploitation and the emergence of pseudo-scientific racialized hierarchies. This included transatlantic enslavement and the growing power of the British East India Company. Some historians believe that using the word ‘enlightenment’ obscures these histories.  

We are now questioning whether we should employ this contested term in the gallery and whether the text should do more to highlight the violence and complexities associated with this period in British history.  

The range of artworks displayed in the gallery has changed over time. Some paintings have remained in place since the room opened in 2016, but others have since moved to different galleries. New acquisitions have also been added to the display.  

The paintings currently on show in the room either represent or allude to diverse global locations and histories. However, one challenge that we face as curators is bringing cohesion to this varied assortment.  

Browse a selection of the works in the gallery below.  

For all their variety, the paintings in the room have something in common. All of them are the work of British artists and reflect the perspectives of British naval commanders and colonial officials. They offer a one-sided view of history, obscuring or ignoring the viewpoints of people around the world whose lives and communities were impacted by British maritime activity.  

What is the effect of these paintings on visitors to the Queen’s House, especially those from diasporic communities whose homelands and histories are represented? How might the gallery be changed to incorporate a broader variety of perspectives?  

Answering these questions requires consultation and collaboration. As curators, we cannot speak for groups to whom we do not belong ourselves. Instead, we must listen to and amplify their voices.  

Reimagining an entire gallery is a big job, so we decided to start small, taking six of the paintings in the room as an initial case study.  

The selected paintings depict landscapes from locations in the Pacific, including Aotearoa-New Zealand, New Caledonia, Tahiti and Rapanui. They were produced by artist William Hodges, who sailed with Captain James Cook on a British naval expedition to the Pacific in 1772 to 1775. This was the second of Cook’s three Pacific voyages.  

The purpose of the voyage was to search for landmasses and to undertake studies of local plants, animals, people and celestial phenomena. This work was not motivated purely by intellectual curiosity. The British Admiralty’s instructions to Cook made it clear that scientific investigation went together with the pursuit of opportunities for trade, resource extraction, conquest and colonisation. 

As the official voyage artist, Hodges’s role was to depict the people and places that Cook’s ship visited. He made drawings and oil sketches during the voyage, then worked these studies up into finished paintings when he was back in his London studio.  

The resulting pictures were displayed in public exhibitions and published as book illustrations, shaping how people in eighteenth-century Britain imagined the Pacific – a place that they were unlikely ever to visit. 

The six paintings on display in the Queen’s House are from a set of twenty-four that Hodges made for the Admiralty. Hanging in the corridors and offices of Admiralty House, the pictures provided more than just decoration: they were mission statements, asserting the British government’s desire for global expansion.   

But what do people from Pacific communities see when they look at these paintings?  

Cook assured viewers that Hodges’s paintings were accurate, writing in his official account of the voyage that the pictures served ‘to give a more perfect idea…than could be formed from written descriptions only’.  

However, this claim of veracity was misleading. Hodges’s landscapes were in fact carefully constructed and even fictionalised images, which reflected British prejudices and colonial interests. 

To understand how Hodges’s paintings are experienced by members of Pacific communities, we needed input from someone with an intimate connection to the region. Fortuitously, Mangaian master carver, Robbie Atatoa, was visiting the Museum in summer 2025 as part of a British Council ‘Connections Through Culture’ residency.  

Robbie’s work with the Museum was principally focussed on taonga (treasured items) from Mangaia in the collection. However, he and his wife Polly, who is from New Zealand, generously donated a day of their time to spend with us looking at Hodges’s Pacific pictures.  

Robbie and Polly offered insights into the places, people, clothing and taonga depicted in the paintings. They pointed out instances where Hodges’s ignorance of Pacific cultures had led him to misunderstand or misrepresent certain details. 

They also noted that Hodges often evoked scenes from the Bible or from Ancient Greece and Rome. Such subjects were familiar to him as a British artist but bore no relationship to the lives of the indigenous peoples of Tahiti, Aotearoa-New Zealand, New Caledonia and Rapanui.  

One of the most revealing and powerful moments during our day with Robbie came when we were looking at Hodges’s painting of the northern coast of Tahiti, looking towards the island of Moorea. In the foreground are two Tahitian men in a canoe. Robbie was drawn to these figures, commenting that, if he were there, he would be fishing from a canoe – just like them.  

This comment from Robbie stayed with us because it echoed an online article by art historian Manon Gaudet, which had inspired our curatorial approach. Entitled ‘Whose View? The Limitations of Labels’, Gaudet’s piece analysed Hodges’s View of Matavai Bay in the Island of Otaheite [Tahiti] in the collection of the Yale Centre for British Art.  

In Gaudet’s words, ‘as viewers of Hodges’s painting, we share in the artist’s elevated position on a ship overlooking the bay’, but she also points out this is ‘not the only subject position available’.  

Drawing on the work of Tuscarora artist and scholar Rick Hill, Gaudet encourages us to consider not only the ‘view from the ship’ (the British perspective) but also the ‘view from the canoe’ (the Indigenous one).  

As a settler scholar, Gaudet makes no claims to know what the view from a Tahitian canoe would have looked like in the 1770s, nor what a present-day Tahitian perspective on Hodges’s painting might be – and neither do we. However, we embraced the invitation, as Gaudet puts it, ‘to look differently and think critically about whose perspectives are privileged and whose are absent from the interpretive framework on offer [in the gallery].’ 

Robbie’s identification with the men in the canoe affirmed to us the importance of bringing the ‘view from the canoe’ into the Queen’s House. It also underscored the necessity of working with co-curators from Pacific communities to achieve this.  

Our day with Robbie showed us that there are other ways of looking at the paintings on display in the Queen’s House. However, more work is needed to incorporate different perspectives in the gallery in a meaningful way.  

We want to meet with more individuals and communities who have a connection to the places and histories represented in the paintings. It is our hope that they will become co-curators on the project and that their insights will inform and shape the changes that we make within the gallery.  

In so doing, we hope to bring the approach in the Queen’s House into line with the Pacific Encounters gallery in the National Maritime Museum, which was created in collaboration with communities from across the Pacific Ocean. 

Changes in the Queen’s House might include new labels, either in addition to or instead of the existing text on the walls. We may also look to move or change certain artworks. 

Whatever we do will depend on the availability of budget and resources. More importantly, it will also hinge on what our co-curators believe is worthwhile.