Description
The National Gallery is London's great art museum, on the north side of Trafalgar Square. It holds more than 2,300 paintings from the mid-13th century to 1900, from Giotto to Cézanne, and the main collection is free to enter.
It is not a royal collection. Paris, Florence and Munich opened their kings' paintings to the public, but Britain's royal paintings stayed with the king. So the nation started from scratch in 1824, buying 38 paintings from the banker John Julius Angerstein. Two thirds of today's collection came as gifts.
The neoclassical building by William Wilkins opened in 1838, on a square that had just been laid out between the rich West End and the poorer East. It was criticized as too small, and it has been extended ever since. The Sainsbury Wing, which opened in 1991, holds the early Renaissance paintings.
Among the masterpieces, The Ambassadors by Holbein is a double portrait full of detail. The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello is a tangle of lances and horses, in perspective. The Baptism of Christ by Piero della Francesca is all calm and light.
Do not walk past Leonardo's cartoon of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, or the Rokeby Venus by Velázquez. In the 19th-century rooms, Van Gogh's Sunflowers blaze in yellow.
Some of these works have lived dangerously. In 1914 the suffragette Mary Richardson slashed the Rokeby Venus with a knife, in protest. In 1961 an unemployed bus driver, Kempton Bunton, walked out with Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington and sent it back four years later. The jury found him not guilty of stealing the painting, only the frame.
In the Second World War the paintings were sent to a slate quarry at Manod in North Wales. The empty building did not close: the pianist Myra Hess gave daily lunchtime concerts, to keep up London's spirits.
The building has its own details. Under your feet in the entrance halls is the mosaic floor of Boris Anrep, made between 1928 and 1952. It is full of allegorical figures with the faces of the famous, among them Virginia Woolf, Greta Garbo and Winston Churchill.
Don't miss
• The Ambassadors.
• Sunflowers.
• The Battle of San Romano.
• The Rokeby Venus.
• Leonardo's cartoon.
Did you know?
• In 1957 a parliamentary commission wrote that the paintings are not the purpose of the gallery, only the means to give people "an ennobling enjoyment".
• Turner left his paintings to the nation on condition that two of them hang beside works by Claude: the wish is still honored.
It is not a royal collection. Paris, Florence and Munich opened their kings' paintings to the public, but Britain's royal paintings stayed with the king. So the nation started from scratch in 1824, buying 38 paintings from the banker John Julius Angerstein. Two thirds of today's collection came as gifts.
The neoclassical building by William Wilkins opened in 1838, on a square that had just been laid out between the rich West End and the poorer East. It was criticized as too small, and it has been extended ever since. The Sainsbury Wing, which opened in 1991, holds the early Renaissance paintings.
Among the masterpieces, The Ambassadors by Holbein is a double portrait full of detail. The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello is a tangle of lances and horses, in perspective. The Baptism of Christ by Piero della Francesca is all calm and light.
Do not walk past Leonardo's cartoon of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, or the Rokeby Venus by Velázquez. In the 19th-century rooms, Van Gogh's Sunflowers blaze in yellow.
Some of these works have lived dangerously. In 1914 the suffragette Mary Richardson slashed the Rokeby Venus with a knife, in protest. In 1961 an unemployed bus driver, Kempton Bunton, walked out with Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington and sent it back four years later. The jury found him not guilty of stealing the painting, only the frame.
In the Second World War the paintings were sent to a slate quarry at Manod in North Wales. The empty building did not close: the pianist Myra Hess gave daily lunchtime concerts, to keep up London's spirits.
The building has its own details. Under your feet in the entrance halls is the mosaic floor of Boris Anrep, made between 1928 and 1952. It is full of allegorical figures with the faces of the famous, among them Virginia Woolf, Greta Garbo and Winston Churchill.
Don't miss
• The Ambassadors.
• Sunflowers.
• The Battle of San Romano.
• The Rokeby Venus.
• Leonardo's cartoon.
Did you know?
• In 1957 a parliamentary commission wrote that the paintings are not the purpose of the gallery, only the means to give people "an ennobling enjoyment".
• Turner left his paintings to the nation on condition that two of them hang beside works by Claude: the wish is still honored.