Short answers, pulled from the story.
The National Portrait Gallery opened at its St Martin's Place site, next to the National Gallery, on the 4th of April 1896. Philanthropist William Henry Alexander funded the building with donations of £60,000 and then £20,000, and Ewan Christian served as architect.
Philip Stanhope, 5th Earl Stanhope, proposed the National Portrait Gallery to Parliament in 1846 and succeeded on his third attempt in 1856. Founder trustees included Stanhope, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Ellesmere, who donated the Chandos portrait as the gallery's first acquisition.
The National Portrait Gallery closed for a £41 million refurbishment project called Inspiring People, with full closure by July 2020 and reopening on the 20th of June 2023. The project added new galleries, a public forecourt and a new main entrance with bronze doors designed by Tracey Emin.
In 2009 the National Portrait Gallery sent a demand letter to a volunteer editor who had downloaded thousands of high-resolution reproductions of its paintings and uploaded them to a collaborative media-sharing site. The gallery argued it held copyright over the digital images because of its investment in creating them.
The National Portrait Gallery had digitised around 100,000 images, roughly a third of its entire collection. In 2012 it also licensed 53,000 low-resolution images for free non-commercial use under a Creative Commons licence.
The Chandos portrait is the National Portrait Gallery's most famous image of William Shakespeare, although it is not certain the sitter is the playwright. Lord Ellesmere donated it to the nation as the gallery's first acquisition.