From the May 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
The walls of the National Gallery have always felt generously stocked, leaving barely a pause in the progression from one of the world’s great paintings to the next. Nevertheless, in global terms, the collection, however choice, is a small one: the Louvre has some 5,500 paintings, the Prado 8,000, while the Hermitage in St Petersburg groans under 17,000. So the 2,300 pictures housed at Trafalgar Square seems paltry by comparison. It is also a lopsided gathering: half the collection comprises Italian Renaissance paintings (800 works) and Dutch and Flemish Golden Age pictures (450 works) – a reflection of late 18th- and 19th-century British taste. When the gallery opened in May 1824, based on 38 paintings bought by the art-loving banker John Julius Angerstein (although these included a healthy smattering of classical landscapes by Claude and Gaspard Dughet) and augmented two years later by 16 more given by Sir George Beaumont, these schools became the foundational genres of British art.
If one of the original ideas behind the National Gallery was to provide native artists with high-grade continental examples to learn from and emulate, the asymmetry of the collection has made the National Gallery’s long-held desire to tell the story of the development of Western European painting a tricky one. The task was complicated further with the founding of the Tate Gallery – initially the National Gallery of British Art – in 1897. Off to Millbank went a great number of British artists born after 1790, and it wasn’t until 1996 that the two galleries settled properly on their spheres of influence, with 1900 as the rough demarcation date. These agreements simultaneously freed up space at Trafalgar Square but muddied the narrative possibilities.
National Gallery rehang The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (1475) Antonio and Piero Pollaiulo. Photo: © National Gallery, London
Opportunities to rethink and refine just what the National Gallery is for have come along only periodically – when the paintings returned from wartime safekeeping in the Manod slate mine in north Wales, for example, and with the opening of the Sainsbury Wing in 1991. Now, more than three decades after the unveiling of that controversial and supposedly once-in-a-generation building designed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, the occasion of the gallery’s bicentenary has provided another opportunity for the institution to look at itself long and hard.
This month, at the tail end of the National’s bicentenary year, a redesigned Sainsbury Wing will be unveiled, along with a rehang of the entire gallery’s permanent collection. The new design by Annabelle Selldorf was envisaged as the highlight of the NG200 celebrations. Her aim was to lighten the Sainsbury Wing at ground level, remove columns, smooth out angles, offer better sightlines into Trafalgar Square and reconfigure its shop and cloakroom to present the visitor with a more straightforward and indeed uplifting experience. Initially, normal business was supposed to carry on as best as possible throughout the disruption of the remodelling process. But the gallery then realised that here was an opportunity to go further and the idea of a complete rethink of the National’s 66 galleries took shape. As Christine Riding, director of collections and research and the lead figure in the rehang project, puts it, what better way is there to ‘celebrate a great collection’? This celebration also meant finding a way somehow to display a further 250 works alongside the 750 paintings already on the walls.
The Wilton Diptych (c. 1395–99), English or French (?). National Gallery, London
The aims of the rehang, she says, were not only to refresh the displays but also to bring greater coherence to them. For example, the existing chronological display meant that some paintings – such as the Northern Renaissance pictures – were not best suited to the rooms they found themselves in; there was no real opportunity to show how artists drew on other artists and used that tradition to make something different; nor could certain themes easily be picked out without disrupting the narrative. There was a sense too that some of the galleries, for all the rolling titivation that goes on, looked a little staid.
The irony of all this is that during the gallery’s anniversary year the Sainsbury Wing, with all its bells and whistles, was closed. What’s more, at certain times 40 per cent of the collection has been fully shut off to visitors while 300 pictures were temporarily removed from the walls. The results of the rehang in the original Wilkins building (1832–38) have been gradually apparent as each revivified gallery has been revealed, but the coherence of the whole scheme only now becomes clear, with the reopening of the revamped wing.
According to the National Gallery’s director, Gabriele Finaldi, street-level entry through the Sainsbury Wing is meant to be a ‘potent, democratic architectural gesture… consistent with the deeply embedded notion that the paintings belong to everyone and that entry to the gallery is free’. That being so, the entire collection is approached from Venturi and Scott Brown’s now airier staircase.
The problem that always dogged the layout remains: there is no single walking route through both buildings; the visitor still needs to enter the Sainsbury Wing galleries and then double back to cross to the Wilkins building. It is a quirk ameliorated by giving the new galleries greater presence than they had previously. Turn left at the top of the staircase and the first room contains not just The Wilton Diptych but both Leonardo’s The Virgin of the Rocks and the Burlington House Cartoon as part of a capsule collection intended to make a statement: ‘What painting can do.’
Further in, an enfilade of rooms has been designed to replicate the nave of a church with Florentine overtones courtesy of a restrained palette of colours and materials: grey-blue pietra serena accents, pale grey for the walls displaying religious works, a darker shade for those holding mythologies, portraits and secular images. The feel is very much that of a pared-back Pazzi Chapel in Florence. On either side, further rooms – squarer and with offset doorways – were modelled on suites found in Italian ducal settings, such as the Gonzaga palace in Mantua.
It is also here that some design tricks regularly used in temporary exhibitions have been adopted for the permanent display. Above Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ (c. 1437–45), for example, is a shallow relief arch that is a subtle nod to the architecture of the painting’s original setting in the church of San Giovanni Battista in Val d’Afra in the painter’s hometown of Borgo Sansepolcro. It helps create, says Riding, ‘a sort of private devotional space’. Meanwhile, vitrines – until now only sparingly used in the galleries – become a statement fixture, especially for the display of predellas, allowing them to be seen from both sides at a comfortable height and liberating wall space in the process. There are also rooms dedicated to individual topics, such as gold-ground paintings – stressing the global nature of early altarpieces, since the gilding was derived from gold coins with a distant provenance that arrived along the trade routes – and the emergence of landscape as a genre in the early 16th century.
Portrait of Gerolamo (?) Barbarigo (c. 1510), Titian. National Gallery, London
In preparation, the National’s team looked at what other galleries in the process of modernising were doing – the Courtauld Gallery, the Rijksmuseum, the Met and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp. They cherry-picked an idea here and an idea there: from Antwerp, for example, they noted how a small devotional work was placed on a square of an alternative colour on the wall which made both an extra frame and gave the impression that the painting was slightly larger than it is. The Rijksmuseum, on the other hand, provided an object lesson in the effective use of display cases for its medieval and early Renaissance collection.
Such touches, and similar ones, are sparingly but effectively used across all the galleries. So a group of family portraits by Gainsborough, whose 12 paintings make him the British artist with the most works in the collection, are displayed on a large panel painted a flat earthy green that hangs just in front of the damask-covered walls. It is a subtle touch that draws attention to the pictures as a discrete cluster within the wider context. There will also be single-artist rooms devoted to Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens and Monet. Meanwhile, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888) – with Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait and Holbein’s Ambassadors, one of the most-visited paintings in the collection – is hung in the centre of a wall between other of his pictures but on a vertical strip of a slightly paler grey so that it gives the impression of standing slightly proud, although the wall is in fact flush.
Elsewhere, the gallery’s two main west-east vistas are fully opened up; the one through the northern galleries focusing on Tiepolo’s Allegory with Venus and Time (c. 1754–58) hung high but not so as to crick the neck, while the central axis ends with George Stubbs’s rearing Whistlejacket (c. 1762), a note of drama at the end of a stately sequence. So, on leaving the Sainsbury Wing galleries there is a natural pull to draw the viewer through the gallery.
Many of the tweaks have been done with a light touch. Room 15, a polygonal vestibule-like room linking the north galleries to the rest of the Wilkins building, now holds four paintings and a distinctive narrative. Titian’s Portrait of Gerolamo (?) Barbarigo (c. 1510) sits opposite Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait at the Age of 34 (1640), with the Dutchman making clear his borrowing by unequivocally taking his pose from the Venetian. Then Rubens’s Portrait of Susanna Lunden(?) (Le Chapeau de Paille) (c. 1622–25) is paired with another descendant; on seeing the picture in Antwerp, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun used it as a model for her own Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat (1782). As the sole woman artist of the quartet, she has been given the sightline. In just four paintings, the idea of artists positioning themselves as part of an ongoing tradition is firmly established.
Portrait of Susanna Lunden(?) (‘Le Chapeau de Paille’) (c. 1622–25), Peter Paul Rubens. National Gallery, London
Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat (1782), Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun. National Gallery, London
Indeed, this aspect of continuity was present even in the Angerstein paintings, with both Hogarth, who had been dead for just 60 years when the National Gallery opened, and David Wilkie, who was then 39, present among the more venerable names. As Riding notes: ‘the idea of public collections actually inspiring artists, which is the purpose of us being here, means influence is a living thing, rather than just a stop and start’. The most celebrated example is J.M.W. Turner’s bequest of two of his paintings on the condition that they be hung alongside Claude’s Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca (‘The Mill’) and Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba. Both were paintings collected by Angerstein that Turner had first seen and come to love in the National Gallery. These four pictures hang in the main Wilkins octagon against claret damask that has been cleaned, its holes from previous hangs carefully repaired.
Of course, numerous paintings have also been conserved during the project, including visitor favourites such as Constable’s The Hay Wain (1821) and Thomas Lawrence’s The Red Boy (1825), while other pictures have received new frames, including Cézanne’s Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses) (c. 1894–1905) and the many parts of the San Pier Maggiore Altarpiece (1370–71), a polyptych by Jacopo di Cione and workshop, which have long been separate. These have now been given a new, bespoke gothic architectural frame so large that members of the gallery staff were invited into the framing studio to help burnish the gilding.
It will take an unusually observant visitor to notice the majority of the changes, from new oak floors to the replacement of the old plush deep-button benches (which although Victorian in style, in fact dated from the 1980s) and the use of wire rather than chain hanging cables in some of the later galleries to give a slightly more modern aesthetic. But the point is that the interventions don’t lead to a game of spot the difference. They keep the paintings, and the story they tell, at the forefront.
The Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery, London, reopens on 10 May.
From the May 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.