Short answers, pulled from the story.
The National Gallery was founded in 1824 and is located in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, Central London. It opened initially in John Julius Angerstein's former townhouse at No. 100 Pall Mall before moving to its current building, which opened on the 9th of April 1838.
The British government purchased 38 paintings from the heirs of John Julius Angerstein in 1824 for £57,000, funded by an unexpected repayment of a war debt by Austria. The collection was supplemented in 1826 by paintings from Sir George Beaumont's gift of 16 works, and in 1831 by a bequest of 35 paintings from the Reverend William Holwell Carr.
Sir Charles Lock Eastlake was the first director of the National Gallery, appointed in 1855 after a critical House of Commons report called for leadership above the trustees. He bought 148 pictures abroad and 46 in Britain, concentrating on Northern and Early Italian Renaissance masters previously neglected by the gallery. He served until 1865 and his private collection also entered the gallery after his death, as he had always intended.
The paintings were first evacuated to locations in Wales including Penrhyn Castle and the university colleges of Bangor and Aberystwyth. From 1940 they were moved to a requisitioned slate quarry at Manod, near Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales, after Winston Churchill rejected proposals to send them to Canada, writing that "not a picture shall leave these islands".
The Sainsbury Wing is a 1991 extension to the west of the main building, designed by postmodernist architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown to house the gallery's Renaissance paintings. It was built after a donation of almost £50 million from Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover and his brothers Simon and Sir Timothy Sainsbury, made in April 1985. A previous design by Ahrends, Burton and Koralek was dropped after Prince Charles described it as a "monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend".
Project Domani is a £375 million expansion of the National Gallery announced in September 2025, which includes a new wing north of the Sainsbury Wing on the site of St Vincent House, a 1960s building acquired by the charity in the late 1990s. The expansion is expected to open in the early 2030s and will have space for 250 additional paintings. On the 7th of April 2026, Kengo Kuma and Associates with BDP and MICA were announced as the winning design team.