The call for a National Gallery '' by
Sebastiano del Piombo, from the
Angerstein collection. This became the founding collection of the National Gallery in 1824. The painting has the
accession number NG1, making it officially the first painting to enter the gallery. The late 18th century saw the
nationalisation of royal or princely art collections across mainland Europe. The Bavarian royal collection (now in the
Alte Pinakothek, Munich) opened to the public in 1779, that of the
Medici in
Florence around 1789 (as the
Uffizi Gallery), and the Museum Français at the
Louvre was formed out of the former French royal collection in 1793.
Great Britain, however, did not follow other European countries, and the British
Royal Collection still remains in the sovereign's possession. In 1777, the British government had the opportunity to buy an art collection of international stature, when the descendants of Sir
Robert Walpole put
his collection up for sale. The MP
John Wilkes argued for the government to buy this "invaluable treasure" and suggested that it be housed in "a noble gallery... to be built in the spacious garden of the
British Museum". Nothing came of Wilkes's appeal and 20 years later the collection was bought in its entirety by
Catherine the Great; it is now to be found in the
State Hermitage Museum in
Saint Petersburg. A plan to acquire 150 paintings from the
Orléans collection, which had been brought to London for sale in 1798, also failed, despite the interest of both King
George III and the Prime Minister,
William Pitt the Younger. The twenty-five paintings from that collection now in the gallery, including "NG1", arrived later by a variety of routes. In 1799, the dealer
Noël Desenfans offered a ready-made national collection to the British government; he and his partner Sir
Francis Bourgeois had assembled it for the king of
Poland, before the
Third Partition in 1795 abolished Polish independence. This offer was declined and Bourgeois bequeathed the collection to his old school,
Dulwich College, on his death. The collection opened in 1814 in Britain's first purpose-built public gallery, the
Dulwich Picture Gallery. The Scottish dealer William Buchanan and the collector Joseph Count Truchsess both formed art collections expressly as the basis for a future national collection, but their respective offers (both made in 1803) were also declined. Following the Walpole sale many artists, including
James Barry and
John Flaxman, had made renewed calls for the establishment of a National Gallery, arguing that a British school of painting could only flourish if it had access to the canon of European painting. The
British Institution, founded in 1805 by a group of aristocratic connoisseurs, attempted to address this situation. The members lent works to exhibitions that changed annually, while an art school was held in the summer months. However, as the paintings that were lent were often mediocre, some artists resented the Institution and saw it as a racket for the gentry to increase the sale prices of their
Old Master paintings. One of the Institution's founding members,
Sir George Beaumont, 7th Baronet, would eventually play a major role in the National Gallery's foundation by offering a gift of 16 paintings. In 1823, another major art collection came on the market, which had been assembled by the recently deceased
John Julius Angerstein. Angerstein was a Russian-born émigré banker based in London; his collection numbered 38 paintings, including works by
Raphael and
Hogarth's
Marriage A-la-Mode series. On 1 July 1823,
George Agar-Ellis, a
Whig politician, proposed to the
House of Commons that it purchase the collection. The appeal was given added impetus by Beaumont's offer, which came with two conditions: that the government buy the
Angerstein collection, and that a suitable building was to be found. The unexpected repayment of a war debt by
Austria finally moved the government to buy Angerstein's collection, for £57,000.
Foundation and early history , the home of the National Gallery from 1824 to 1834 The National Gallery opened in 1824 in Angerstein's former townhouse at No. 100
Pall Mall. Angerstein's paintings were joined in 1826 by those from Beaumont's collection, and in 1831 by the Reverend
William Holwell Carr's bequest of 35 paintings. Initially the Keeper of Paintings,
William Seguier, bore the burden of managing the gallery, but in July 1824 some of this responsibility fell to the newly formed board of trustees. The National Gallery at Pall Mall was frequently overcrowded and hot, and its diminutive size in comparison with the Louvre in Paris was a cause of national embarrassment. But Agar-Ellis, by then a trustee of the gallery, appraised the site for being "in the very gangway of London"; this was seen as necessary for the gallery to fulfil its social purpose.
Subsidence in No. 100 caused the gallery to move briefly to No. 105 Pall Mall, which the novelist
Anthony Trollope described as a "dingy, dull, narrow house, ill-adapted for the exhibition of the treasures it held". This in turn had to be demolished for the opening of a road to
Carlton House Terrace. In 1832, construction began on a new building by
William Wilkins on the northern half of the site of the old
Royal Mews in
Charing Cross, after the transformation of its southern half into
Trafalgar Square in the late 1820s. The location was a significant one, between the wealthy
West End and poorer areas to the east. The argument that the collection could be accessed by people of all
social classes outstripped other concerns, such as the pollution of central London or the failings of Wilkins's building, when the prospect of a move to
South Kensington was mooted in the 1850s. According to the Parliamentary Commission of 1857, "The
existence of the pictures is not the end purpose of the collection, but the means only to give the people an ennobling enjoyment".
Growth under Eastlake and his successors 15th- and 16th-century Italian paintings were at the core of the National Gallery and for the first 30 years of its existence the trustees' independent acquisitions were mainly limited to works by
High Renaissance masters. Their conservative tastes resulted in several missed opportunities and the management of the gallery later fell into complete disarray, with no acquisitions being made between 1847 and 1850. A critical House of Commons report in 1851 called for the appointment of a director, whose authority would surpass that of the trustees. Many thought the position would go to the German art historian
Gustav Friedrich Waagen, whom the gallery had consulted on previous occasions about the lighting and display of the collections. However, the man preferred for the job by
Queen Victoria,
Prince Albert and the Prime Minister,
Lord John Russell, was the Keeper of Paintings at the gallery, Sir
Charles Lock Eastlake. Eastlake, who was President of the
Royal Academy, played an essential role in the foundation of the
Arundel Society and knew most of London's leading art experts. '' by
Piero della Francesca, one of Eastlake's purchases The new director's taste was for the Northern and Early Italian Renaissance masters or "primitives", who had been neglected by the gallery's acquisitions policy but were slowly gaining recognition from connoisseurs. He made annual tours to the continent and to Italy in particular, seeking out appropriate paintings to buy for the gallery. In all, he bought 148 pictures abroad and 46 in Britain, among the former such seminal works as
Paolo Uccello's
The Battle of San Romano. Eastlake also amassed a private art collection during this period, consisting of paintings that he knew did not interest the trustees. His ultimate aim, however, was for them to enter the National Gallery; this was duly arranged upon his death by his friend and successor as director,
William Boxall, and his widow Lady
Elizabeth Eastlake. One of the most persistent criticisms of the National Gallery, other than of the perceived inadequacies of the building, has been of its conservation policy. The gallery's detractors have accused it of having had an over-zealous approach to restoration. The first cleaning operation at the National Gallery began in 1844 after Eastlake's appointment as Keeper, and was the subject of attacks in the press after the first three paintings to receive the treatment – a
Rubens, a
Cuyp and a
Velázquez – were unveiled to the public in 1846. The gallery's most virulent critic was J. Morris Moore, who wrote a series of letters to
The Times under the pseudonym "Verax" savaging the institution's cleanings. While an 1853 Parliamentary
select committee set up to investigate the matter cleared the gallery of any wrongdoing, criticism of its methods has been erupting sporadically ever since from some in the art establishment. '' cartoon by
John Leech depicting the restoration controversy then ongoing The gallery's lack of space remained acute in this period. In 1845, a
large bequest of British paintings was made by
Robert Vernon; there was insufficient room in the Wilkins building so they were displayed first in Vernon's town house at No. 50 Pall Mall and then at
Marlborough House. The gallery was even less well equipped for its next major bequest, as
J. M. W. Turner was to bequeath the entire contents of his studio, excepting unfinished works, to the nation upon his death in 1851. The first 20 of these were displayed off-site in Marlborough House in 1856.
Ralph Nicholson Wornum, the gallery's Keeper and Secretary, worked with
John Ruskin to bring the bequest together. The stipulation in Turner's will that two of his paintings be displayed alongside works by
Claude is still honoured as of 2024, but his bequest has never been adequately displayed in its entirety; today the works are divided between Trafalgar Square and the Clore Gallery, a small purpose-built extension to
Tate Britain completed in 1985. The third director, Sir
Frederic William Burton, laid the foundations of the collection of 18th-century art and made several outstanding purchases from English private collections. The acquisition in 1885 of two paintings from
Blenheim Palace, Raphael's
Ansidei Madonna and
van Dyck's
Equestrian Portrait of Charles I, with a record-setting grant of £87,500 from the
Treasury, brought the gallery's "golden age of collecting" to an end, as its annual purchase grant was suspended for several years thereafter. When the gallery purchased
Holbein's
Ambassadors from the
Earl of Radnor in 1890, it did so with the aid of private individuals for the first time in its history. In 1897, the formation of the National Gallery of British Art, known unofficially from early in its history as the
Tate Gallery, allowed some British works to be moved off-site, following the precedent set by the Vernon collection and the Turner Bequest. Works by artists born after 1790 were moved to the new gallery on
Millbank, which allowed
Hogarth, Turner and
Constable to remain in Trafalgar Square.
Early 20th century '') by
Diego Velázquez The
Great depression of British agriculture at the turn of the 20th century caused many aristocratic families to sell their paintings, but the British national collections were priced out of the market by American plutocrats. This prompted the foundation of the
National Art-Collections Fund, a society of subscribers dedicated to stemming the flow of artworks to the United States. Their first acquisition for the National Gallery was
Velázquez's
Rokeby Venus in 1906, followed by
Holbein's
Portrait of Christina of Denmark in 1909. However, despite the crisis in aristocratic fortunes, the following decade was one of several great bequests from private collectors. In 1909, the industrialist
Ludwig Mond gave 42 Italian Renaissance paintings, including the
Mond Crucifixion by
Raphael, to the gallery. Other bequests of note were those of
George Salting in 1910,
Austen Henry Layard in 1916 and Sir
Hugh Lane in 1917. The initial reception of
Impressionist art at the gallery was exceptionally controversial. In 1906, Sir Hugh Lane promised 39 paintings, including
Renoir's
Umbrellas, to the National Gallery on his death, unless a suitable building could be built in
Dublin. Although eagerly accepted by the director
Charles Holroyd, they were received with extreme hostility by the trustees;
Lord Redesdale wrote that "I would as soon expect to hear of a Mormon service being conducted in
St. Paul's Cathedral as to see the exhibition of the works of the modern French Art-rebels in the sacred precincts of Trafalgar Square". Perhaps as a result of such attitudes, Lane amended his will with a codicil that the works should only go to Ireland, but crucially this was never witnessed. Lane died on board the in 1915, and a dispute began which was not resolved until 1959. Part of the collection is now on permanent loan to the
Hugh Lane Gallery and other works rotate between London and Dublin every few years. A fund for the purchase of modern paintings established by
Samuel Courtauld in 1923 bought
Seurat's
Bathers at Asnières and other modern works for the nation; in 1934, many of these were transferred to the National Gallery from the Tate. The director
Kenneth Clark's decision in 1939 to label a group of Venetian paintings, ''
Scenes from Tebaldeo's Eclogues'', as works by
Giorgione was controversial at the time, and the panels were soon identified as works by
Andrea Previtali by a junior curator Clark had appointed.
Second World War Shortly before the outbreak of the
Second World War the paintings were evacuated to locations in
Wales, including
Penrhyn Castle and the university colleges of
Bangor and
Aberystwyth. In 1940, during the
Battle of France, a more secure home was sought, and there were discussions about moving the paintings to Canada. This idea was firmly rejected by
Winston Churchill, who wrote in a telegram to Kenneth Clark, "bury them in caves or in cellars, but not a picture shall leave these islands". Instead a slate quarry at
Manod, near
Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales, was requisitioned for the gallery's use. In the seclusion afforded by the paintings' new location, the Keeper (and future director)
Martin Davies began to compile scholarly catalogues on the collection, with assistance of the gallery's library which was also stored in the quarry. The move to Manod confirmed the importance of storing paintings at a constant temperature and humidity, something the gallery's conservators had long suspected but had hitherto been unable to prove. This eventually resulted in the first air-conditioned gallery opening in 1949. Art exhibitions were held at the gallery as a complement to the recitals. The first of these was
British Painting since Whistler in 1940, organised by
Lillian Browse, who also mounted the major joint retrospective
Exhibition of Paintings by Sir William Nicholson and Jack B. Yeats held from 1 January to 15 March 1942, which was seen by 10,518 visitors. Exhibitions of work by war artists, including
Paul Nash,
Henry Moore and
Stanley Spencer, were also held; the
War Artists' Advisory Committee had been set up by Clark in order "to keep artists at work on any pretext". In 1941, a request from an artist to see
Rembrandt's
Portrait of Margaretha de Geer (a new acquisition) resulted in the "Picture of the Month" scheme, in which a single painting was removed from Manod and exhibited to the general public in the National Gallery each month. The art critic
Herbert Read, writing that year, called the National Gallery "a defiant outpost of culture right in the middle of a bombed and shattered metropolis". The paintings returned to Trafalgar Square in 1945.
Post-war developments The last major outcry against the use of radical conservation techniques at the National Gallery was in the immediate post-war years, following a restoration campaign by the gallery's chief restorer
Helmut Ruhemann while the paintings were in Manod Quarry. When the cleaned pictures were exhibited to the public in 1946 there followed a furore with parallels to that of a century earlier. The principal criticism was that the extensive removal of
varnish, which was used in the 19th century to protect the surface of paintings but which darkened and discoloured over time, may have resulted in the loss of "harmonising" glazes added to the paintings by the artists themselves. The opposition to Ruhemann's techniques was led by
Ernst Gombrich, a professor at the
Warburg Institute who in later correspondence with a restorer described being treated with "offensive superciliousness" by the National Gallery. A 1947 commission concluded that no damage had been done in the recent cleanings. '' by
Leonardo da Vinci In the post-war years, acquisitions have become increasingly difficult for the National Gallery as the prices for Old Masters – and even more so for the Impressionists and
Post-Impressionists – have risen beyond its means. Some of the gallery's most significant purchases in this period would have been impossible without the major public appeals backing them, including
Leonardo da Vinci's cartoon of
The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist (bought in 1962) and
Titian's
Death of Actaeon (bought in 1972). The gallery's purchase grant from the government was frozen in 1985, but later that year it received an endowment of £50 million from Sir
Paul Getty, enabling many major purchases to be made. Mahon's bequest was made on the condition that the gallery would never
deaccession any of its paintings or charge for admission. The respective remits of the National and Tate Galleries, which had long been contested by the two institutions, were more clearly defined in 1996. 1900 was established as the cut-off point for paintings in the National Gallery, and in 1997 more than 60 post-1900 paintings from the collection were given to the Tate on a long-term loan, in return for works by
Gauguin and others. However, future expansion of the National Gallery may yet see the return of 20th-century paintings to its walls.
21st century In the 21st century there have been three large fundraising campaigns at the gallery: in 2004, to buy
Raphael's
Madonna of the Pinks; in 2008, for
Titian's
Diana and Actaeon; and in 2012, Titian's
Diana and Callisto. Both Titians were bought in tandem with the
National Gallery of Scotland for £95 m. Both of these major works were sold from the
collection of the Duke of Sutherland. The National Gallery is now largely priced out of the market for Old Master paintings and can only make such acquisitions with the backing of major public appeals; the departing director
Charles Saumarez Smith expressed his frustration at this situation in 2007. The National Gallery was sponsored by the Italian arms manufacturer
Finmeccanica between October 2011 and October 2012. The sponsorship deal allowed the company to use gallery spaces for gatherings, and the gallery was used to host delegates during the
DSEI arms fair and the
Farnborough Airshow. The sponsorship deal was ended a year early after protests. In February 2014, the gallery purchased
Men of the Docks by the American artist
George Bellows for $25.5 million (£15.6 million). It was the first major American painting to be purchased by the gallery. The director,
Nicholas Penny, termed the painting a new direction for the gallery, a non-European painting in a European style. Its sale was controversial in the United States. In 2018, the National Gallery was one of the first public galleries in London to charge more than £20 for admission to a special exhibition, the exhibition in question being of works by
Claude Monet. In February 2019, an
employment tribunal ruled that the gallery had incorrectly classed its team of educators as self-employed contractors. The educators were awarded the status of "workers" following legal action brought by 27 claimants. The case received considerable press and media coverage. In 2024, the National Gallery celebrated its 200th anniversary with a range of programmes, events, and collaborations. In September 2025, the National Gallery announced plans for a £375 million expansion project, provisionally titled 'Project Domani'. The initiative includes the construction of a new wing behind the existing Sainsbury Wing and a policy change allowing the acquisition of works created after 1900. The expansion is scheduled to open in the early 2030s. On 7 April 2026 (subject to ratification at the end of a standstill period ending 16 April), the National Gallery announced that Kengo Kuma and Associates with BDP and MICA won the competition to design the new wing. ==Architecture==