Gallery Watcher

An observing device hidden in a painting's frame or a carved grotesque on a wall, made to watch a room and give the alarm. It cannot stop anybody. It can make sure that somebody comes.

Collectors and keepers of galleries, who cannot station a man in every room, hide watchers in the rooms instead. The device sits behind the face of a portrait or inside a stone grotesque, with lenses where the eyes should be, and watches. When it sees what it was set to see, a hand on a case or a figure in the room after the hour, it signals a bell, a guard or another device. In the better collections of London it is said that every third portrait is looking back.

Its value is that nobody knows which. A thief who has studied a gallery for a month knows where the guards stand and the hours of the bell, and does not know which of forty faces on the wall is watching him. The collectors' rooms at the Noctuary are said to have more watchers than paintings, which the secretary of admissions neither confirms nor denies.

As witnesses describe it

Either a framed portrait in which faint blue lines of light trace the carving of the frame and the eyes are a little too bright, or a stone grotesque mounted on a wall with lens-eyes that glow when active. Unpowered, it is a painting or a carving like any other.