The National Gallery from Trafalgar Square

The National Gallery is an art gallery in London, located on the north side of Trafalgar Square. It holds the National Collection of Art from 1250 to 1900 (subsequent art from the National Collection is housed in Tate Modern). Some British art is included, but the National Collection of British art from this period is mainly in Tate Britain. The collection of 2,300 paintings belongs to the British public, and entry to the main collection is free, though there are charges for entry to special exhibitions. (There is however a suggested minimum voluntary donation, paradoxically advertised as helping to keep the Gallery free of charge.)

The Collection

The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello

Artists whose work is hung in the National Gallery include:

• Paolo Uccello (The Battle of San Romano)
• Sandro Botticelli (Venus and Mars)
• Jan van Eyck (The Arnolfini Portrait)
• Leonardo da Vinci (The Virgin of the Rocks, Cartoon of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist)
• Titian (Bacchus and Ariadne)
• Rembrandt van Rijn (Belshazzar's Feast, two self portraits)
• Diego Velasquez (The "Rokeby Venus")
• Joachim Beuckelaer (Four Elements)
• William Hogarth (Marriage à la Mode)
• Joseph Wright (An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, Mr and Mrs Thomas Coltman)
• Vincent van Gogh (Sunflowers)
• Willem Drost (Portrait of a Young Woman with her Hands Folded on a Book)
• Claude Monet (The Water-Lily Pond, The Thames Below Westminster)
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir (The Umbrellas, Boating on the Seine)
• John Constable (The Hay Wain)
• George Stubbs (Whistlejacket)
• J. M. W. Turner (The Fighting Temeraire)

History of the Building

The National Gallery at night, illuminated for an event to promote the launch of a Pepsi commercial

The building on Trafalgar Square was begun in 1837 by William Wilkins. Wilkins was faced by a number of constraints, not least having to incorporate columns from the portico of the demolished Carlton House into his façade. Required to house both the National Gallery and the Royal Academy, the building was too small from the beginning. The Royal Academy moved to its present home in Burlington House in 1868, but still the collection continued to grow and required more space. Between 1872 and 1876 an East Wing was added by the classical architect Edward Middleton Barry, and his octagonal vestibule remains the grandest part of the Victorian building. Despite continually being added to piecemeal throughout the following century, the symmetrical plan envisaged by Barry has remained remarkably intact.

The most important addition to the building in recent years has been the Sainsbury Wing, designed by the leading postmodernist architect Robert Venturi to house the collection of renaissance paintings and built in 1991. Building on the site had been delayed after Prince Charles infamously denounced a design for an ultra-modern extension to the gallery by the architects Ahrends, Burton and Koralek as "a monstrous carbuncle on the face of an elegant and much-loved friend". It is unsurprising, then, that the Sainsbury Wing is subdued by Venturi's standards, blending in with the Wilkins façade.

Following the pedestrianisation of Trafalgar Square, the Gallery is currently engaged in a 'masterplan' to convert the vacated office space on the ground floor into public space. The plan will also fill in disused courtyards and make use of land acquired from the adjoining National Portrait Gallery on Charing Cross Road, which it gave to National Gallery in exchange for land for its 2000 extension. The first phase, the East Wing Project designed by Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones, opened to the public in 2004. This provided a new ground level entrance from Trafalgar Square.

Directors

• Sir Charles Lock Eastlake PRA (1793 - 1865) Served: 2 July 1855 - 24 December 1865 (10 years, died in post)
• Sir William Boxall RA (1800 - 1879) Served: 13 February 1866 - 1874 (8 years)
• Sir Frederic William Burton (1816 - 1900) Served: 20 February 1874 - March 1894 (20 years)
• Sir Edward Poynter Bt PRA (1836 - 1919) Served: April 1894 - 1904 (10 years)
• Sir Charles Holroyd (1861 - 1917) Served: 11 June 1906 - June 1916 (10 years)
• Sir Charles John Holmes (1868 - 1936) Served: 4 August 1916 - December 1928 (12 years)
• Sir Augustus Moore Daniel (1866 - 1950) Served: January 1929 - December 1933 (5 years)
• Sir Kenneth Mackenzie Clark (1903 - 1983) Served: January 1934 - December 1945 (11 years)
• Sir Philip Hendy (1900 - 1980) Served: January 1946 - December 1967 (22 years)
• Sir Martin Davies CBE Dlitt FBA FSA(1908 - 1975) Served: January 1968 - September 1973 (6 years)
• Sir Michael Vincent Levey MVO(1927 -) Served: October 1973 - December 1986 (13 years)
• Robert Neil MacGregor (1946 -) Served: January 1987 - May 2002 (15 years)
• Dr Charles Robert Saumarez Smith (1954-) Served: July 2002 -

Other information

Nearest London Underground stations:

• Charing Cross (Northern, Bakerloo lines)
• Embankment (District, Circle lines)
• Leicester Square (Northern, Piccadilly lines)

External links

• National Gallery (http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/), official website

it:National Gallery di Londra ja:ナショナルギャラリー (ロンドン) pl:National Gallery w Londynie