The Gallery of Missing Portraits (Floor 419)

The Gallery of Missing Portraits is a cataloguing department occupying the whole of Floor 419, dedicated to the care, arrangement, and scholarly description of empty frames. It is not, as is sometimes supposed by visitors from the lower landings, a gallery of portraits that have been lost. It is a gallery of portraits that were never hung, the frames having arrived without them. The distinction is maintained with some firmness by the department's present Keeper and is set out at length in the Gallery's founding instrument, the Nineteenth Concordance.

The Gallery's holdings comprise 2,411 frames at the last count, of which 2,388 are hung and 23 remain in the accession crypt pending the resolution of a dispute over wall allocation that has run since the winter of the year the catalogue records as 9,114. Each hung frame carries a placard describing its missing subject in the present tense, as though the subject were merely out of the room.

Foundation

The Gallery owes its existence to a bequest. Aveline Locquard, a collector whose movements through the Tower are otherwise poorly documented, left to the Librarians a consignment of frames — 1,140 at the time of transfer, later augmented by a second consignment of 302 — with the stipulation that they be displayed as frames and not as furniture. The Nineteenth Concordance, ratified some eleven years after the bequest was received, gave the consignment a floor, a Keeper, and a budget line for placards. Its first clause remains the department's standing authority:

"What is absent shall be described with the same diligence as what is present, and shall be described in the same hand, and on card of the same weight."

— Nineteenth Concordance, Clause 1

The clause has been read narrowly and broadly. The narrow reading, favoured by the department's own scriptorium, holds that "card of the same weight" settles the matter of materials and nothing else. The broad reading, favoured by the Curatorium of Unfinished Likenesses in its periodic petitions, holds that the clause obliges the Gallery to describe subjects it has never possessed, a duty the Curatorium has repeatedly offered to discharge on the Gallery's behalf.

Jurisdictions and grievances

The Gallery's borders are contested on three sides. To the north it shares a landing, and a long jurisdictional overlap, with the Gallery of Unfinished Portraits on Floor 11,507, whose subjects are unidentified rather than absent; the two departments have never agreed on where the first category ends and the second begins, and a joint memorandum of the year 9,203 simply assigns the disputed frames to whichever department has already written the placard. To the south, the Gallery of Unseen Portraits on Floor 407 maintains a territorial grievance of considerable age, alleging that the Gallery of Missing Portraits has annexed wall space that was never ceded. To the west, the Gallery of Unpainted Portraits on Floor 707 operates under a permanent Instability Mandate and does not answer correspondence.

The Curatorium of Unfinished Likenesses has petitioned three times for the transfer of the Gallery's holdings to its own care, on the ground that an empty frame is an unfinished likeness and therefore within its remit. The third petition was refused in the year 9,388 by the then-Keeper, Oriel Vann, whose written answer is still quoted in the department's instruction of new clerks: that a frame is finished, and it is the portrait that is not, and the Curatorium may petition the portrait. The Curatorium has not accepted this reasoning but has ceased to petition, which the Gallery counts as a settlement.

Method

Placards are drafted from the frame itself. Where a frame bears a maker's mark, a hanging wire, or a residue of sizing along the rebate, the describer is permitted to infer the dimensions, period, and probable station of the missing subject; where it bears nothing, the placard records the absence without embellishment. A representative entry reads: Subject unknown. Seated, by the wear at the lower rail. Painted in the manner of the middle floors. Frame gilt, chipped at the upper right corner. The final clause is not a description of the subject and is included because the Gallery's auditors require one physical fact per placard.

Frames are dusted on the first working day of each quarter. No portrait is to be hung in the Gallery without the written consent of the Keeper, and no consent has been sought since 9,041.

Scholarly disagreement

The principal dispute in the literature concerns the Gallery's own name. The Nineteenth Concordance styles the department the Gallery of Missing Portraits, and its annexes use the phrase without comment. The Forty-Second Concordance, ratified later and amended twice, refers throughout to "the Gallery of Absent Portraits, Floor 419," and its schedule of floors lists no other department on that landing. The Seventeenth Concordance, which is older than both and was thought lost until a partial recension surfaced in the Vault of Unfinished Business, uses a third form, "the Gallery of Portraits Not Present," and assigns it to Floor 414.

Three positions obtain. The first holds that the Concordances describe one department under three names and that the floor discrepancy is a copying error of the kind common in the 414–419 band. The second holds that there were once two departments and that one absorbed the other, the surviving name being a matter of administrative convenience. The third, advanced in a privately circulated paper by a clerk of the Personnel Management office and never formally answered, observes that the Gallery's accession register records no gap, no merger, and no change of name, and concludes that the Concordances are simply wrong and that this is not the Gallery's difficulty. The department's official position is that it answers to the name on its door.

Access

The Gallery is open to accredited readers during the hours the lamps are lit. Visitors are asked not to stand in the frames, a request posted at the entrance in the Keeper's own hand and renewed each year since 9,116. Requests for the loan of frames to neighbouring departments are considered on their merits and are, in practice, refused.