The noted caricaturists Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin depicted both the art and the raucous crowd of viewers at a Royal Academy exhibition in their satirical work "The Exhibition Room at Somerset House" (1800).

WSJ: Spies in the House of Art | Playing House | When Artists Take On Museums | by Tom L. Freudenheim

Others were pushed into writing by circumstance: Mary Rowlandson, who was captured and held hostage by native Americans in 1675, later described her experiences in a vivid account that was part anthropology (her captors' alarming diet included tortoises and horses' ears) and part adventure story.

ECONOMIST: Women's literature in America