Passing London’s Trafalgar Square, it is difficult to imagine a time when the site was not dominated by the neoclassical silhouette of the National Gallery, which celebrated its bicentenary on 10 May of this year. The museum was founded in 1824 and its collection, while considerably smaller than that of the Louvre or the Prado, provides a comprehensive survey of Western art from the mid-trecento to the onset of the 20th Century. In honour of the museum’s landmark anniversary year, we are looking back at some of its most memorable acquisitions and moments in history.
Unlike many national galleries, the National Gallery did not originate with the donation or acquisition of a princely collection – for instance, the creation of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum to house the magnificent Habsburg collection, or of Florence’s Uffizi to exhibit the Medici treasures. The call to establish an art gallery for the nation began in earnest in 1777, when the M.P. John Wilkes entreated the government to acquire the superb collection of Sir Robert Walpole, then being sold by his heirs. When support failed to materialise, the collection, which included masterpieces by Rubens, Rembrandt, Poussin and Van Dyck, was sold to Catherine the Great – for £40,550 – and is now part of Saint Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum. A subsequent plan, to purchase 150 artworks from the famed Orléans collection when it arrived for sale in London in 1798, also failed to gain traction, in spite of the support of both King and Prime Minister. The government then turned down the offer, a year later, of a collection assembled by the dealers Noel Desenfans and Sir Francis Bourgeois; that collection opened in 1814 as the Dulwich Picture Gallery. When collections acquired by William Buchanan, a Scottish dealer, and Joseph Count Truchsess, a private individual, were also refused in 1803, prospects looked dismal indeed – certainly, those artist members of the British Institution (the forerunner to the Royal Academy) had been clamouring for a National Gallery since the Walpole Sale.
Sebastiano del Piombo, The Raising of Lazarus, 1517-19, oil on synthetic panel, transferred from wood,
381 x 289.6 cm, The National Gallery, London. This was the first painting to be purchased from the Angerstein collection and carries the inventory number NG1.
At last, in 1823, the House of Commons agreed to the purchase, for £57,000, of 38 fine works from the collection of John Julius Angerstein, a friend of Sir Thomas Lawrence. These were exhibited at Angerstein’s own house at 100 Pall Mall until a permanent structure to house them could be built – one of the conditions stipulated by Sir George Beaumont, Bt., when he promised his own collection to the nation. A further 35 paintings were bequeathed by William Holwell Carr in 1831.
The Pall Mall exhibition space was far from ideal: crowded, dark and hot. It fell to the architect William Wilkins to design a new space on the northern part of Trafalgar Square, with construction beginning in 1832 and the space opening to the public in 1838. Built of Portland stone, it features a columned central Corinthian portico on a pediment with steps to either side, with a cupola on a stone drum just beyond the façade. The staircase hall, designed by Sir John Taylor in 1884-87, is grand and imposing, while the rooms are lofty and bright.What about some National Gallery facts and figures? According to a 2005 BBC radio 4 poll, the National Gallery is home to five of the nation’s top ten most beloved paintings, including number one (J.M.W. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire) and number two (John Constable’s The Haywain).
Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Fighting Temeraire, 1839, oil on canvas, 90.7 x 121.6 cm., The National Gallery, London
The gallery’s most famous director was probably Sir Kenneth Clark, of Civilisation fame, who ran the museum between January 1934 and December 1945, having taken up the directorship aged just 30. It was under his leadership that all the museum’s artworks were removed in the ten days leading to the declaration of War on 3 September 1939, and sent to secure locations in Wales – a good thing, too, as the west wing of the gallery was badly damaged during the bombings.
Sir Francis Grant, Sir Charles Eastlake, pen, ink and wash on paper, 29.3 x 20.3 cm., given by Simon C. Dickinson Ltd to The National Gallery, London in 2012. Sir Charles Eastlake was the second Keeper of the Gallery and in 1855 was made its first director.
The National Gallery is currently working to balance its collection in terms of representation, an admirable goal of many museums worldwide: at last count, of the approximately 2300 artworks in the collection, only 27 are by women. And the most successful exhibition ever staged at the National Gallery – according to visitor numbers – was Leonardo da Vinci, Painter at the court of Milan, which took place in 2011-12. Over the course of the show, the museum welcomed 323,827 visitors. It remains to be seen whether that record will be broken by this autumn’s blockbuster show Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, opening on 14 September!
Henri-Pierre Danloux, The Baron de Besenval in his Salon, 1791, oil on canvas, 46.5 x 37 cm., sold by Simon C. Dickinson Ltd to The National Gallery, London in 2004