Article made by Vince Engelborghs
The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The Gallery is an exempt charity, and a non-departmental public body of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Its collection belongs to the public of the United Kingdom and entry to the main collection is free of charge. It is the fourth most visited art museum in the world, after the Musée du Louvre, the British Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Unlike comparable museums in continental Europe, the National Gallery was not formed by nationalising an existing royal or princely art collection. It came into being when the British government bought 38 paintings from the heirs of John Julius Angerstein, an insurance broker and patron of the arts, in 1824. After that initial purchase the Gallery was shaped mainly by its early directors, notably Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, and by private donations, which comprise two-thirds of the collection. The resulting collection is small in size, compared with many European national galleries, but encyclopaedic in scope; most major developments in Western painting "from Giotto to Cézanne" are represented with important works. It used to be claimed that this was one of the few national galleries that had all its works on permanent exhibition, but this is no longer the case.The present building, the third to house the National Gallery, was designed by William Wilkins from 1832–38. Only the façade onto Trafalgar Square remains essentially unchanged from this time, as the building has been expanded piecemeal throughout its history. Wilkins's building was often criticised by people who believed it had aesthetic deficiencies and lack of space; the latter problem led to the establishment of the Tate Gallery for British art in 1897. The Sainsbury Wing, an extension to the west by Robert Venturi andDenise Scott Brown, is a notable example of Postmodernist architecture in Britain. The current Director of the National Gallery is Nicholas Penny. The first suggestion for a National Gallery on Trafalgar Square came from John Nash, who envisaged it on the site of theKing's Mews, while a Parthenon-like building for the Royal Academy would occupy the centre of the square. Economic recession prevented this scheme from being built, but a competition for the Mews site was eventually held in 1831, for which Nash submitted a design with C. R. Cockerell as his co-architect. Nash's popularity was waning by this time, however, and the commission was awarded to William Wilkins, who was involved in the selection of the site and submitted some drawings at the last moment. 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 resulting building was deemed a failure on almost all counts.The site only allowed for the building to be one room deep, as a workhouse and a barracks lay immediately behind. To exacerbate matters, there was a public right of way through the site to these buildings, which accounts for the access porticoes on the eastern and western sides of the façade. These had to incorporate columns from the demolished Carlton House and their relative shortness result in an elevation that was deemed excessively low, and a far cry from the commanding focal point that was desired for the northern end of the Square. Also recycled are the sculptures on the façade, originally intended for Nash's Marble Arch but abandoned due to his financial problems. The eastern half of the building housed the Royal Academy until 1868, which further diminished the space afforded to the Gallery.The building was the object of public ridicule before it had even been completed, as a version of the design had been leaked to the Literary Gazette in 1833. Two years before completion, its infamous "pepperpot" elevation appeared on the frontispiece of Contrasts (1836), an influential tract by the Gothicist A. W. N. Pugin, as an example of the degeneracy of the classical style. EvenWilliam IV (in his last recorded utterance) thought the building a "nasty little pokey hole", while William Makepeace Thackeray called it "a little gin shop of a building". The twentieth-century architectural historian Sir John Summerson echoed these early criticisms when he compared the arrangement of a dome and two diminutive turrets on the roofline to "the clock and vases on a mantelpiece, only less useful". Sir Charles Barry's landscaping of Trafalgar Square, from 1840, included a north terrace so that the building would appear to be raised, thus addressing one of the points of complaint. Opinion on the building had mellowed considerably by 1984, when the Prince of Walescalled the Wilkins façade a "much-loved and elegant friend", in contrast to a proposed extension.
Collection:
- English or French Medieval: The Wilton Diptych
- Jan van Eyck: The Arnolfini Portrait
- Pisanello: The Vision of Saint Eustace
- Paolo Uccello: The Battle of San Romano, Saint George and the Dragon
- Rogier van der Weyden: The Magdalen Reading
- Masaccio: Madonna and Child
- Dieric Bouts: The Entombment
- Piero della Francesca: The Baptism of Christ
- Antonello da Messina: Portrait of a Man, St Jerome in his Study
- Giovanni Bellini: The Agony in the Garden, Madonna del Prato, Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan
- Piero del Pollaiolo: The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian
- Sandro Botticelli: Venus and Mars
- Hieronymus Bosch: Christ Crowned with Thorns
- Leonardo da Vinci: The Virgin of the Rocks, The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist
- Albrecht Dürer, St Jerome in the Wilderness
- Michelangelo: The Entombment, The Manchester Madonna
- Jan Gossaert: The Adoration of the Kings
- Raphael: The Aldobrandini Madonna, The Ansidei Madonna, Portrait of Pope Julius II, The Madonna of the Pinks, The Mond Crucifixion, Vision of a Knight
- Titian: Allegory of Prudence, Bacchus and Ariadne, Diana and Actaeon, Diana and Callisto, The Death of Actaeon, A Man with a Quilted Sleeve, Portrait of the Vendramin Family
- Hans Holbein the Younger: The Ambassadors
- Parmigianino: Portrait of a Collector, The Vision of Saint Jerome
- Agnolo Bronzino: Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time
- Tintoretto: The Origin of the Milky Way
- Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Adoration of the Kings
- Paolo Veronese: The Family of Darius before Alexander
- El Greco: Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple
- Caravaggio: Boy Bitten by a Lizard, Supper at Emmaus, Salome with the Head of John the Baptist
- Peter Paul Rubens: The Judgement of Paris
- Nicolas Poussin: The Adoration of the Golden Calf
- Diego Velázquez: Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, The Rokeby Venus
- Anthony van Dyck: Equestrian Portrait of Charles I
- Claude Lorrain: Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba
- Rembrandt: Self-Portrait at the Age of 34, Belshazzar's Feast, Self-Portrait at the Age of 63
- Johannes Vermeer: Lady Standing at a Virginal, Lady Seated at a Virginal
- Canaletto: The Stonemason's Yard
- William Hogarth: The Graham Children, Marriage à-la-mode
- George Stubbs: Whistlejacket
- Thomas Gainsborough: Mr and Mrs Andrews
- Joseph Wright of Derby: An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump
- Francisco Goya: Portrait of the Duke of Wellington
- J. M. W. Turner: The Fighting Temeraire, Rain, Steam and Speed
- John Constable: The Cornfield, The Hay Wain
- Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres: Madame Moitessier
- Eugène Delacroix: Ovid among the Scythians
- Edgar Degas: Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, Young Spartans Exercising
- Paul Cézanne: Les Grandes Baigneuses
- Claude Monet: Snow at Argenteuil
- Pierre-Auguste Renoir: The Umbrellas
- Henri Rousseau: Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!)
- Vincent van Gogh: Sunflowers, A Wheatfield with Cypresses
- Georges Seurat: Bathers at Asnières