National Gallery

• 1. Introduction

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  The National Gallery in Trafalgar Square holds more than 2,300 paintings, and every single one of them belongs to the British public, free to walk in and see on any day. That fact alone is remarkable. But the story of how those paintings got there is stranger and more contested than the calm grandeur of the building suggests. Who paid? Who chose? And why does a country that still keeps its royal art collection locked in the sovereign's hands have one of the most encyclopaedic collections of Western painting in the world? The gallery covers Western painting "from Giotto to Cezanne", not through any single act of nationalization but through arguments in Parliament, missed opportunities, private bequests, wartime tunnels in Wales, and a running argument about whether cleaning old paintings is genius or vandalism. The answers stretch from a banker's townhouse on Pall Mall to a Welsh slate quarry, and from a suffragette's meat cleaver to a postmodernist architect's deliberate false columns.

• 2. The Collection That Almost Wasn't

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  In 1777, the descendants of Sir Robert Walpole offered his art collection for sale, and the MP John Wilkes urged the government to buy this "invaluable treasure" and house it in "a noble gallery... to be built in the spacious garden of the British Museum". The government declined. Twenty years later, Catherine the Great bought the entire collection; it now sits in the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. The pattern of near-miss and refusal repeated itself. A plan to acquire 150 paintings from the Orleans collection brought to London in 1798 collapsed despite the interest of both King George III and Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger. In 1799, the dealer Noel Desenfans offered a ready-made national collection to the British government. He and his partner Sir Francis Bourgeois had assembled it for the king of Poland before the Third Partition in 1795 abolished Polish independence. The government again said no. Bourgeois bequeathed the collection to Dulwich College; it opened in 1814 as Britain's first purpose-built public gallery, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, years before the National Gallery existed. By 1823 the Scottish dealer William Buchanan and the collector Joseph Count Truchsess had each assembled collections expressly to serve as the basis for a future national gallery, and both offers, made in 1803, were turned down. What finally moved Parliament was not artistic vision but a war debt. Austria repaid an unexpected sum to the British government, and that money was used to buy 38 paintings from the estate of the recently deceased banker John Julius Angerstein for £57,000.

• 3. Pall Mall to Trafalgar Square

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  Angerstein had been a Russian-born emigre banker based in London, and his collection included works by Raphael and Hogarth's Marriage A-la-Mode series. The National Gallery opened in 1824 in Angerstein's former townhouse at No. 100 Pall Mall. The Reverend William Holwell Carr added a bequest of 35 paintings in 1831. The Pall Mall premises were frequently overcrowded and hot, and the novelist Anthony Trollope, after the gallery moved briefly to No. 105, described it as a "dingy, dull, narrow house, ill-adapted for the exhibition of the treasures it held". The trustee George Agar-Ellis, however, defended the central location as being "in the very gangway of London", arguing the gallery had to be physically accessible to people of all social classes. That argument eventually won. In 1832, construction began on a new building by William Wilkins on the northern half of the site of the old Royal Mews in Charing Cross, sited deliberately between the wealthy West End and the poorer areas to the east. It opened to the public on the 9th of April 1838. A Parliamentary Commission report in 1857 stated the galleries' purpose plainly: "The existence of the pictures is not the end purpose of the collection, but the means only to give the people an ennobling enjoyment". That principle, fixed so early, drove every subsequent argument about where the gallery should sit, how large it should be, and who should run it.

• 4. Eastlake and the Shape of the Collection

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  For the first thirty years after opening, the trustees' independent acquisitions were mainly confined to High Renaissance masters, and between 1847 and 1850 no acquisitions were made at all. A critical House of Commons report in 1851 called for a director to be appointed above the trustees. Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and Prime Minister Lord John Russell all backed Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, the Keeper of Paintings who was also President of the Royal Academy. Eastlake's taste ran to the Northern and Early Italian Renaissance masters, painters the gallery had ignored but who were slowly gaining recognition from connoisseurs. He made annual tours to Italy and the continent and bought 148 pictures abroad and 46 in Britain. Among the former was Paolo Uccello's The Battle of San Romano. Eastlake also built a private collection during this period, buying paintings he knew the trustees would not want, intending all along for them to enter the National Gallery after his death. His friend and successor as director, William Boxall, and his widow Lady Elizabeth Eastlake arranged for exactly that to happen. The third director, Sir Frederic William Burton, acquired two paintings from Blenheim Palace in 1885, Raphael's Ansidei Madonna and van Dyck's Equestrian Portrait of Charles I, with a record-setting Treasury grant of £87,500. The purchase ended the gallery's "golden age of collecting" and its annual purchase grant was suspended for several years. When Holbein's The Ambassadors was bought from the Earl of Radnor in 1890, it was the first time the gallery had needed private individuals to help fund a purchase.

• 5. Controversy Over Cleaning

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  One of the most persistent arguments in the gallery's history has nothing to do with what paintings it bought, but with what it did to the paintings it owned. The first cleaning operation began in 1844, and when the first three treated paintings, a Rubens, a Cuyp and a Velazquez, were shown to the public in 1846, the press attacked the gallery. A critic who wrote under the pseudonym "Verax" in The Times was the most virulent; his real name was J. Morris Moore. An 1853 Parliamentary select committee investigated and cleared the gallery of wrongdoing, but the controversy did not end there. After the Second World War, the gallery's chief restorer Helmut Ruhemann conducted a major restoration campaign while the paintings were stored at Manod Quarry. When the cleaned pictures went on public display in 1946, the furore returned. The principal concern was that extensive removal of 19th-century varnish might have stripped away "harmonising" glazes the artists themselves had applied. The opposition was led by Ernst Gombrich, a professor at the Warburg Institute, who later wrote that the gallery had treated him with "offensive superciliousness" during the dispute. A 1947 commission concluded that no damage had been done. Criticism of the gallery's conservation methods has continued to surface from parts of the art establishment at intervals ever since.

• 6. A Quarry in Wales

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  Shortly before the Second World War began, 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 location was sought and there was serious discussion about moving the collection to Canada. Winston Churchill rejected that proposal in a telegram to the director 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. In the seclusion of Manod, the Keeper Martin Davies began compiling scholarly catalogues of the collection with the help of the gallery's library, which had also been transported there. The quarry's stable conditions taught the gallery's conservators something they had long suspected but never been able to prove: that constant temperature and humidity mattered for the preservation of paintings. That discovery led directly to the first air-conditioned gallery opening in 1949. While the building at Trafalgar Square stood empty, the pianist Myra Hess and other musicians including Moura Lympany gave daily lunch-time recitals there to sustain public morale, since every concert hall in London was closed. Art exhibitions ran alongside the recitals. The exhibition of Paintings by Sir William Nicholson and Jack B. Yeats, held from the 1st of January to the 15th of March 1942, was seen by 10,518 visitors. In 1941 a single painting was brought back from Manod each month under the "Picture of the Month" scheme, after an artist wrote in asking to see Rembrandt's Portrait of Margaretha de Geer.

• 7. Architecture and Its Critics

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  William Wilkins had hoped his building would be a "Temple of the Arts, nurturing contemporary art through historical example", but parsimony and compromise shaped everything about it. The site only allowed for a building one room deep, with a workhouse and barracks directly behind. Columns recycled from the demolished Carlton House had to be incorporated into the access porticoes because of a right of way through the site, and their relative shortness left the elevation too low to provide Trafalgar Square with a commanding focal point. The building was ridiculed before it was even complete: a version of the design was leaked to The Literary Gazette in 1833, and two years before it opened, its "pepperpot" elevation appeared in Augustus Pugin's influential 1836 tract Contrasts as an example of the degeneracy of the classical style. William IV called it a "nasty little pokey hole" and William Makepeace Thackeray called it "a little gin shop of a building". The architectural historian Sir John Summerson later compared the roofline arrangement to "the clock and vases on a mantelpiece, only less useful". The addition of a new west wing in 1991, designed by the postmodernists Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, was shaped by a famous outburst from Prince Charles, who in 1984 had compared a rejected earlier scheme, by Ahrends, Burton and Koralek, to "a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend". That phrase entered the English language as shorthand for a modern building that clashes with its surroundings. The Sainsbury Wing Venturi and Scott Brown built draws deliberate quotations from sources as disparate as the Scala Regia in the Vatican and Ancient Egyptian temples. A letter written in 1990 by donor John Sainsbury, discovered in 2023 during demolition of two false columns, revealed that Sainsbury himself had called those columns "a mistake of the architect" and predicted the gallery would "live to regret" them.

• 8. Incidents and the Future

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  On the 10th of March 1914, the suffragette Mary Richardson entered the gallery and damaged Velazquez's Rokeby Venus with a cleaver, 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 start of the First World War. In August 1961, an unemployed bus driver named Kempton Bunton stole Goya's Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, in the only successful theft in the gallery's history. Four years later he returned the painting voluntarily. At trial he was acquitted of stealing the painting but found guilty of stealing the frame. In July 1987, Robert Cambridge shot Leonardo's cartoon of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist with a shotgun he had concealed under his coat, telling police he wanted to express his disgust with "political, social and economic conditions in Britain". The pellets did not penetrate the cartoon, but extensive restoration was required. Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers was attacked on the 14th of October 2022 by Just Stop Oil activists who threw tomato soup at it; the Plexiglas protected the painting but the frame was slightly damaged. In September 2025, the gallery announced plans for a £375 million expansion called Project Domani, funded in part by two separate £150 million donations from the Crankstart Foundation and the Julia Rausing Trust. The new wing, to be built north of the Sainsbury Wing on the site of a 1960s building called St Vincent House, will have space for 250 additional paintings. On the 7th of April 2026, the gallery announced that Kengo Kuma and Associates with BDP and MICA had won the design competition. The gallery also announced a policy change allowing the acquisition of works created after 1900, the boundary that has defined the collection since 1996.