National Gallery

The National Gallery was not made by nationalising a royal or princely collection, as its continental counterparts were. It came into being in 1824, when the British government bought 38 paintings from the heirs of John Julius Angerstein and opened them to the public in his former townhouse at No. 100 Pall Mall. Angerstein's pictures were joined in 1826 by those from the Beaumont collection, and in 1831 by the Reverend William Holwell Carr's bequest of 35 paintings. William Seguier, the Keeper of Paintings, carried the burden of managing the gallery until July 1824, when a newly formed board of trustees took on some of the responsibility.

The Pall Mall rooms were frequently overcrowded and hot, and their diminutive size beside the Louvre was felt as a national embarrassment. Agar-Ellis, by then a trustee, nonetheless defended the address for being "in the very gangway of London" - a position held to be necessary if the collection was to serve its social purpose. Subsidence at No. 100 pushed the gallery briefly into No. 105 Pall Mall, which Anthony Trollope described as a "dingy, dull, narrow house, ill-adapted for the exhibition of the treasures it held". That house in turn had to be demolished to open a road to Carlton House Terrace.

The first suggestion for a gallery on Trafalgar Square came from John Nash, who imagined it on the site of the King's Mews with a Parthenon-like Royal Academy in the middle of the square; economic recession killed the scheme. A competition for the Mews site was held in 1831, and although Nash entered with Charles Robert Cockerell as co-architect, his popularity was waning and the commission went to William Wilkins, who had helped select the site and submitted drawings at the last moment. Building began in 1832 on the northern half of the old Royal Mews at Charing Cross, the southern half having been turned into Trafalgar Square in the late 1820s, and the gallery opened to the public on 9 April 1838. Wilkins had hoped to build a "Temple of the Arts, nurturing contemporary art through historical example", but the commission was blighted by parsimony and compromise, and the result was deemed a failure on almost all counts. The site allowed a building only one room deep, because a workhouse and a barracks lay immediately behind it, and a public right of way ran through to them; the porticoes that accommodated it had to use columns salvaged from the demolished Carlton House, while the facade sculptures were recycled from Nash's abandoned Marble Arch scheme. A version of the design leaked to The Literary Gazette in 1833 and the building was ridiculed before it was finished: its "pepperpot" elevation appeared on the frontispiece of Augustus Pugin's Contrasts in 1836 as an example of classical degeneracy, William IV called it a "nasty little pokey hole" in his last recorded utterance, and William Makepeace Thackeray called it "a little gin shop of a building". Sir Charles Barry's landscaping of the square from 1840 added a north terrace so that the building would at least appear to be raised.

The first cleaning operation at the gallery began in 1844, after Eastlake's appointment as Keeper, and when the first three treated paintings - a Rubens, a Cuyp and a Velazquez - were unveiled in 1846 the press attacked. The gallery's most virulent critic was J. Morris Moore, who savaged its cleanings in a series of letters to The Times under the pseudonym "Verax"; a parliamentary select committee set up in 1853 cleared the gallery of wrongdoing, though criticism of its methods has erupted sporadically ever since. Meanwhile the trustees' conservative taste for High Renaissance masters had produced several missed opportunities and then outright paralysis, with no acquisitions made between 1847 and 1850. A critical House of Commons report in 1851 called for a director whose authority would surpass that of the trustees. Many expected the post to go to the German art historian Gustav Friedrich Waagen, whom the gallery had consulted on lighting and display; the man preferred by Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and the Prime Minister Lord John Russell was Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, the gallery's own Keeper of Paintings, President of the Royal Academy and a founder of the Arundel Society.

Eastlake's taste ran to the Northern and Early Italian Renaissance "primitives" the trustees had neglected. He toured the continent annually, Italy above all, and bought 148 pictures abroad and 46 in Britain, among them Paolo Uccello's The Battle of San Romano. He also built a private collection of paintings he knew would not interest the trustees, intending them for the gallery in the end; after his death his friend and successor William Boxall and his widow Lady Elizabeth Eastlake duly arranged it. Space remained the chronic problem. Robert Vernon's large bequest of British paintings in 1845 would not fit in the Wilkins building and was shown first in Vernon's own house at No. 50 Pall Mall and then at Marlborough House, and the gallery was even less equipped for J. M. W. Turner's bequest of the entire contents of his studio, excepting unfinished works, on his death in 1851; the first 20 were displayed off-site at Marlborough House in 1856, the Keeper and Secretary Ralph Nicholson Wornum working with John Ruskin to bring the bequest together. Turner's stipulation that two of his paintings hang alongside works by Claude was still being honoured in 2024, but the bequest has never been adequately displayed in its entirety. The eastern half of the building housed the Royal Academy until 1868, further reducing the room available. When a move to South Kensington was mooted in the 1850s, the argument that the collection could be reached by people of all social classes outstripped the objections about London's pollution and the failings of Wilkins's building; the Parliamentary Commission of 1857 put it that "The existence of the pictures is not the end purpose of the collection, but the means only to give the people an ennobling enjoyment".

The building was enlarged piecemeal. Sir James Pennethorne added a single long gallery in 1860-1861 which, built over the original entrance hall, worsened the cramped conditions inside. Sir Charles Barry had proposed remodelling the whole gallery in 1853, and in 1867 his son Edward Middleton Barry proposed replacing the Wilkins building altogether with a four-domed classical pile that critics denounced as "a strong plagiarism upon St Paul's Cathedral"; that scheme failed, but the demolition of the workhouse let Barry build the gallery's first sequence of grand spaces from 1872 to 1876, disliked by staff who thought their monumental character at odds with the display of pictures. Pennethorne's gallery was pulled down for Sir John Taylor's extension northwards of the main entrance. Under the third director, Sir Frederic William Burton, the gallery laid the foundations of its 18th-century holdings and bought heavily from English private collections: the acquisition in 1885 of Raphael's Ansidei Madonna and van Dyck's Equestrian Portrait of Charles I from Blenheim Palace, on a record grant of 87,500 pounds from the Treasury, brought the "golden age of collecting" to an end, as the annual purchase grant was then suspended for several years. When Holbein's Ambassadors was bought from the Earl of Radnor in 1890, private individuals helped pay for the first time in the gallery's history. The lack of space led to the founding of the National Gallery of British Art, known almost from the start as the Tate Gallery, to which works by artists born after 1790 were moved. That gallery opened on Millbank in 1897, Hogarth, Turner and Constable remaining at Trafalgar Square.

The great depression of British agriculture at the turn of the century put many aristocratic paintings on the market, but the national collections were priced out by American plutocrats. The National Art-Collections Fund was founded by subscribers to stem the flow of pictures to the United States, and bought the gallery Velazquez's Rokeby Venus in 1906 and Holbein's Portrait of Christina of Denmark in 1909. The same decade brought several great private bequests: the industrialist Ludwig Mond gave 42 Italian Renaissance paintings including Raphael's Mond Crucifixion in 1909, followed by George Salting in 1910, Austen Henry Layard in 1916 and Sir Hugh Lane in 1917.

Impressionism was received at Trafalgar Square with open hostility. In 1906 Lane promised the gallery 39 paintings, among them Renoir's Umbrellas, to come on his death unless a suitable building were raised in Dublin. The director Charles Holroyd accepted eagerly; the trustees did not, and Lord Redesdale wrote that "I would as soon expect to hear of a Mormon service being conducted in St. Paul's Cathedral as to see the exhibition of the works of the modern French Art-rebels in the sacred precincts of Trafalgar Square". Perhaps as a result of such attitudes, Lane added a codicil directing the works to Ireland instead - but it was never witnessed. He died aboard the RMS Lusitania in 1915, and the dispute that followed was not settled until 1959; part of the collection is on permanent loan to the Hugh Lane Gallery, with other works rotating between London and Dublin every few years.

On 10 March 1914 the suffrage campaigner Mary Richardson damaged the Rokeby Venus in the gallery in protest at the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst the day before. Later that month another suffragette attacked five Bellinis, and the gallery closed until the outbreak of the First World War, when the Women's Social and Political Union called for an end to violent acts drawing attention to their plight. A fund for modern paintings set up by Samuel Courtauld in 1923 bought Seurat's Bathers at Asnieres and other works for the nation, many of which were transferred from the Tate to the National Gallery in 1934. The classical style was still in use at the gallery in 1929, when a Beaux-Arts gallery was built with money from the dealer and trustee Lord Duveen, while from 1928 to 1952 Boris Anrep relaid the landing floors of Taylor's entrance hall with mosaics whose allegorical figures were portraits of his contemporaries - Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell and T. S. Eliot among them, and Virginia Woolf and Greta Garbo in The Awakening of the Muses. In 1939 the director Kenneth Clark labelled a group of Venetian panels, Scenes from Tebaldeo's Eclogues, as works by Giorgione; the attribution was controversial at the time, and a junior curator Clark had himself appointed soon identified them as works by Andrea Previtali.

Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War the paintings were evacuated to locations in Wales, including Penrhyn Castle and the university colleges of Bangor and Aberystwyth. During the Battle of France in 1940 a more secure home was sought and moving the collection to Canada was discussed, an idea Churchill rejected outright in a telegram to Kenneth Clark: "bury them in caves or in cellars, but not a picture shall leave these islands". A slate quarry at Manod, near Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales, was requisitioned for the gallery instead. In the seclusion of the quarry the Keeper and future director Martin Davies began compiling scholarly catalogues of the collection, helped by the gallery's library, which was stored there too. The move confirmed the value of keeping paintings at a constant temperature and humidity, something the conservators had long suspected but could not previously prove, and eventually resulted in the first air-conditioned gallery opening in 1949.

With every concert hall in London closed, Myra Hess, Moura Lympany and other musicians gave daily lunch-time recitals in the emptied building at Trafalgar Square to raise public morale, and exhibitions were mounted alongside them. The first was British Painting since Whistler in 1940, organised by Lillian Browse, who also mounted the joint retrospective of Sir William Nicholson and Jack B. Yeats from 1 January to 15 March 1942, seen by 10,518 visitors. Work by war artists including Paul Nash, Henry Moore and Stanley Spencer was shown as well; Clark had set up the War Artists' Advisory Committee "to keep artists at work on any pretext". In 1941 an artist's request to see a new acquisition, Rembrandt's Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, produced the "Picture of the Month" scheme, under which a single painting was brought out of Manod and shown to the public each month. Writing that year, the critic Herbert Read called the gallery "a defiant outpost of culture right in the middle of a bombed and shattered metropolis". The paintings returned to Trafalgar Square in 1945.

The last great outcry over the gallery's conservation methods followed immediately. While the collection was at Manod the chief restorer Helmut Ruhemann had carried out a restoration campaign, and when the cleaned pictures were exhibited in 1946 the furore had clear parallels with that of a century before. The principal charge was that stripping away the 19th-century varnish, which darkened and discoloured with age, might also have removed harmonising glazes applied by the artists themselves. Opposition was led by Ernst Gombrich of the Warburg Institute, who later described being treated by the gallery with "offensive superciliousness". A commission in 1947 concluded that no damage had been done.

In August 1961 an unemployed bus driver, Kempton Bunton, stole Goya's Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, in what remains the only successful theft from the gallery; he returned the painting voluntarily four years later and, after a high-profile trial, was found not guilty of stealing the painting but guilty of stealing the frame. In July 1987 Robert Cambridge walked in with a shotgun under his coat and fired at Leonardo's cartoon of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist, telling police he had meant to express his disgust at "political, social and economic conditions in Britain"; the pellets did not penetrate the cartoon, but it needed extensive restoration and returned to display the following year. On 14 October 2022 activists from the Just Stop Oil campaign threw tomato soup at Van Gogh's Sunflowers, which its Plexiglas protected, with minor damage to the frame, and on 6 November 2023 two Just Stop Oil activists smashed the protective glass over the Rokeby Venus with hammers.

Old Master prices, and Impressionist and Post-Impressionist prices still more, rose beyond the gallery's means after the war, and its largest purchases became appeal-funded: Leonardo's cartoon in 1962 and Titian's Death of Actaeon in 1972. The government purchase grant was frozen in 1985, though later that year Sir Paul Getty gave an endowment of 50 million pounds, and in April 1985 Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover with his brothers Simon and Sir Timothy Sainsbury made the donation that paid for a new wing. A competition held in 1982 for the Hampton's site to the west, where a department store had stood until it was destroyed in the Blitz, had produced a winning design by Ahrends, Burton and Koralek that was dropped after the Prince of Wales compared it to a "monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend". The wing that was built instead, in 1991, was designed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Under the directorship of Neil MacGregor the collection was rehung chronologically, dispensing with Eastlake's arrangement by national school, and the Victorian interiors that had embarrassed the 20th century were restored rather than concealed. In 1999 the gallery accepted 26 Italian Baroque paintings from Sir Denis Mahon on condition that it never deaccession a painting or charge for admission - in 1945 its trustees had declined to buy a Guercino from Mahon's collection for 200 pounds, a painting valued at 4 million pounds in 2003.

The long-contested boundary with the Tate was settled in 1996 with 1900 as the National Gallery's cut-off date, and in 1997 more than 60 post-1900 paintings went to the Tate on long-term loan in exchange for works by Gauguin and others. Three large appeals followed in the 21st century: for Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks in 2004, and for Titian's Diana and Actaeon in 2008 and Diana and Callisto in 2012, both Titians bought jointly with the National Gallery of Scotland for 95 million pounds from the Duke of Sutherland's collection. The departing director Charles Saumarez Smith voiced his frustration in 2007 at a market the gallery could no longer enter unaided. Sponsorship by the Italian arms manufacturer Finmeccanica, which ran between October 2011 and October 2012 and let the company use gallery spaces for gatherings and host delegates during the DSEI arms fair and the Farnborough Airshow, was ended a year early after protests. In February 2014 the gallery bought Men of the Docks by George Bellows for 25.5 million dollars, its first major American painting, a purchase the director Nicholas Penny described as a new direction and whose sale was controversial in the United States. In February 2019 an employment tribunal ruled that the gallery had wrongly classed its educators as self-employed contractors, awarding worker status to 27 claimants. Excavations at Jubilee Walk in 2024, the year of the gallery's bicentenary, turned up evidence that the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Lundenwic extended further west than had been supposed. In September 2025 a 375 million pound expansion, provisionally titled Project Domani, was announced, funded in part by two separate 150 million pound donations from the Crankstart Foundation and the Julia Rausing Trust and taking in St Vincent House, a 1960s building the gallery had acquired in the late 1990s; on 7 April 2026, subject to ratification at the end of a standstill period, Kengo Kuma and Associates with BDP and MICA were named winners of the design competition, with the wing expected to open in the early 2030s and to hold 250 more paintings. The building has been listed Grade I since 5 February 1970. The gallery is an exempt charity and a non-departmental public body of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport; it holds the collection in trust on behalf of the British public, entry to the main collection is free, and Gabriele Finaldi is its director.