THE NATIONAL GALLERY

The National Gallery (1838) houses the national collection of Western Art.

After making a Grand Tour of Europe in the 1780s Sir John Leicester decided to principally buy contemporary British art. In 1823 he offered his collection to the government as the nucleus for a national gallery. The then Prime Minister Lord Liverpool declined the tender. The same year John Julius Angerstein, an insurance tycoon and art collector, died. The idea of establishing a national gallery by buying the man s collection was promoted by both King George IV and the art patron Sir George Beaumont. The following year the government acceded. The foundation of the National Gallery was aided by the Austrian government s timely repayment to Britain of a war loan. The National Gallery effectively came into being when the House of Commons voted money for the purchase of 38 paintings from Angerstein s estate. Beaumont added some works from his own collection. For the institution s first decade it was housed in a building on Pall Mall on the site of what is now the Reform Club.

In 1834 the Gallery moved into its present home. Given its prominent location, this is a relatively unimposing building. The structure s architect William Wilkins was under considerable pressure to produce an economic building; he was required to use the columns that Henry Holland had created for Carlton House even though they were inappropriate for his design. He was instructed to make it no taller than its predecessor, the Royal Mews, had been. When the building had been completed, it engendered numerous adverse comments. Initially, the Gallery occupied just part of the edifice, the rest of it housed the Royal Academy of Arts.¹

In 1837 John Constable s The Cornfield (1826) became the first work by a living British artist to enter the Gallery s collection. The painting was bought for the institution by a subscription. In 1854 the government purchased Burlington House in Piccadilly. It was decided that the building should house the Academy and a number of learned societies. This gave the Gallery considerably more space in which to display its works. During the following year Parliament made its first grant to the body of money to spend on acquisitions. With the opening of the Tate Gallery in 1897 much of the National Gallery s British collection was transferred there.

The family wealth of the brothers Sir John, Simon and Timothy Sainsbury derived from a supermarket business. In 1985 the sibs offered to finance the construction of an extension of the Gallery building. The Sainsbury Wing (1991) houses the institution s Early Renaissance collection.

In 2014 the National Gallery bought George Bellow s (1882-1925) painting Men of The Docks (1912). This was the first time that it had acquired a work of art that had been created in North America. Until then the institution had focused upon Western European art.

Location: Trafalgar Square, WC2N 5DN (red, yellow)

Website: www.nationalgallery.org.uk

¹. Initially, the National Gallery was a far shallower building. Over the years it slowly spread itself northwards through a series of extensions.

John Julius Angerstein

John Julius Angerstein arrived in London from Russia at the age of fifteen and was apprenticed to the firm of Thomson & Peters, a merchant house that specialised in the Russian trade. Upon his coming of age, the youth became an insurance underwriter. He went on to dominate Lloyd s of London, moulding much of the market s character according to his own will.

Location: Woodlands Art Gallery, 90 Mycenae Road, Greenwich, SE3 7SE¹

99 Pall Mall, SW1Y 5NQ. Angerstein s townhouse. (orange, turquoise)

See Also: INSURANCE Lloyd s of London

Website: www.nationalgallery.org.uk/people/john-julius-angerstein https://mycenaehouse.co.uk

¹. Angerstein had a hypochondriac streak to his character. One of the rooms of the Greenwich house was fitted with air flutes so that its temperature could be maintained at a constant.

The Carbuncle

The winning design was created by Ahrends Burton & Koralek. Their other work included the British Embassy (2000) in Moscow.

The Thatcher government refused to help finance an extension. Therefore, the gallery found itself having to hold a competition for a mixed gallery and commercial space. The tightness of the site meant that most of the designs that were submitted had a somewhat compromised character. The monstrous carbuncle was designed by Ahrends, Burton & Koralek. A new competition was held. A substantial gift by the Sainsbury brothers meant that all of the site could be devoted to the Gallery. It was won by the husband and wife team Robert Venturi (1925-2018) and Denise Scott Brown.

Venturi was an architect who held a chair in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. He had been schooled in Modernism and worked for Louis Kahn and Eero Saarinen, both of whom were noted Modernist architects. However, in 1954 he had been awarded a two-year scholarship to at the American Academy in Rome and had acquired a profound appreciation of Baroque architecture. In 1957 he set up his own practice. However, he received few commissions and much of his time was spent teaching at the the university of Pennsylvania. His book Complexity and Contradiction In Architecture (1966) had furnished the intellectual wherewithal that had enabled American architects to break with Modernism of Lloyd Wight, van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier

When Venturi had broken with Modernism he had not embraced a retrospective approach but rather had become one of the key founders of Post-Modernism (a term that he disliked). The Wing s exterior was a fa ade that paid reference to the main body of the Gallery and the Dulwich Picture Gallery, however, it bore no relation to the space within, its columns serve no purpose other than ornament. He did make one attempt to make a connection between the exterior s form and the interior s function. This was to have a window in the main gallery that would overlook the eastern end of Pall Mall, which would enable visitors to orient themselves. The curators insisted amongst maximum the wall space that they could hang pictures on and therefore overruled. By then the builders had already put in place the lintel, which in its turn became as redundant as the column. Overall, the architect felt he had become sullied by being associated with the Prince of Wales. As the 1990s progressed Modernism again came to dominate the high-profile section of the architectural profession. However, with time he became phlegmatic and confessed to appreciating the vitriol and inventiveness of British critics. In 2018 English Heritage conferred Grade I listing upon the Extension and sixteen Post-Modernist buildings that Venturi s thinking had inspired.

Super-sized Over The Centuries

The National Gallery s collection includes a Last Supper that was painted by Ercole de Roberti (c.1451-1496). In 2010 The International Journal of Obesity published an academic paper that had been written by the brothers Brian Wansink, a food economist at Cornell University, and Craig Wansink, a religious studies professor at Virginia Wesleyan College. The article analysed 52 pictures of the subject that had been painted over the course of a thousand years. The size of the depicted food portions was compared to the size of the heads present. The former relative to the latter increased by 70% over the millennium.¹

See Also: FOOD

Website: www.nature.com/ijo

¹. Brian Wansink retired from Cornell in 2019 after an investigation had concluded that he had committed academic misconduct. Eighteen of his research papers were retracted.

David Backhouse 2024