The National Gallery, London: an artists’ collection for two centuries

The National Gallery has not always been housed in a neoclassical palace on Trafalgar Square. Two hundred years ago, the national collection first opened its doors to visitors with a fine if modest collection of 38 paintings from the private collection of John Julius Angerstein down the road in his townhouse at 100 Pall Mall. The current building, designed by the architect William Wilkins, opened in 1838 and today the National Gallery has about 2,400 paintings, spanning the history of Western European painting “from Giotto to Cézanne”, or from the mid-13th century to around 1900. The story of the shaping of the National Gallery’s collection—which marks its bicentenary this year—is, as Susanna Avery-Quash, lead curator at the gallery explains, one of opportunities opened up by the French Revolution, artist leaders, intransigent royals and inspiring women.

In the late 18th century, there was a vogue in Western European courts for establishing national art collections, which would be open to the public and serve as an opportunity for states to show off how suave and cultured they were. France, as ever, led the advanced guard. The revolutionaries opened the palace of the Louvre as a museum in 1793, with the majority of works on display from royal and confiscated church collections. The Dutch established the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 1808, and the Spanish the Prado in 1819. There was then no British equivalent. Around this time, though, in 1798, a mysterious organisation called the Bridgewater Syndicate emerged, led by the “canal duke”, Francis Egerton, Duke of Bridgewater, his nephew Lord Gower and the Earl of Carlisle. On to a good thing, the Syndicate bought the French and Italian works from the renowned collection of the Duke of Orléans, who needed the cash as the French Revolution had put him in dire straits.

While the syndicate kept some of the best paintings for themselves—such as Titian’s Diana and Actaeon (1556-9), which would ultimately find its way into the national collection in 2009—they showed the Orléans Collection to the public in several pioneering selling exhibitions, which encouraged public appreciation for Old Master paintings. There was a new feeling that the British need not be a nation of philistines after all, and could stage public art displays at least as well as the French, Spanish and Dutch.

With the successes of the syndicate in mind, some influential public servants believed that Britain would hamper its ascendant global standing without the soft power that came with a national collection (and, significantly, an impressive building to put it in). Many saw a national gallery as also essential for the development of competitive design education and the resurgence of a national school of painting in Britain. The radical MP John Wilkes, best known for introducing the first bill for parliamentary reform in the British Parliament, campaigned to have Sir Robert Walpole’s collection at Houghton in Norfolk as the basis of a national gallery at the British Museum. After some early enthusiasm, this idea was kicked into the long grass and the Houghton collection was sold to Empress Catherine the Great of Russia in 1779; the collection still graces the Hermitage today. It would be another half-century before Wilkes’s ambition for a national collection would be realised.

When the National Gallery was founded in 1824, and based at Angerstein’s townhouse on Pall Mall (first at number 100, between 1824-34, and then at number 105, from 1834-38), it was what might be called a “gentleman’s collection”. This meant that its specialisms were narrow but deep, and fashionably consistent with the tastes of the day, as promoted by leading international art academies. Those tastes were mainly 16th- and 17th-century historical, mythological or religious paintings, such as those by the Bolognese artists Annibale Carracci and Domenichino, and the French Baroque by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. The first painting in the collection’s original inventory—NG1—is Sebastiano del Piombo’s The Raising of Lazarus (1517-19), originally commissioned by the future Pope Clement VII.

Artist-led spirit

The UK’s National Gallery would not be formed based on a royal collection, which was the convention on the continent, despite the royal collection then including important works by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian. The early lack of contributions from the royal family was the source of some resentment among the National Gallery’s early pioneers. Further, there was no regular state purchase grant for pictures when the gallery was established, and the institution thus relied heavily on gifts and bequests in its earliest decades. Luckily, the gallery received a patriotic bequest by the painter J.M.W. Turner, who died in 1851, and left everything in his studio, including the celebrated Dido Building Carthage (1815), to the nation.

Indeed, living artists have played a central role in the National Gallery’s mission from the beginning. For some 30 years between 1838 and 1869, the eastern half of Wilkins’s National Gallery housed the Royal Academy, consistent with the architect’s desire for a “temple of the arts, nurturing contemporary art through historical example”. Two days a week, the gallery would close to the public and only card-carrying artists could wander the corridors for their edification and inspiration.

This artist-led spirit has endured, and there is a rich tradition of artists engaging with, and making new works inspired by, the collection. Between 1977 and 1990 the National Gallery hosted a programme of ten inventive exhibitions, The Artist’s Eye, in which an artist was invited to curate paintings from the permanent collection in whatever way they wished, with interventions by, among others, Anthony Caro, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and David Hockney. This August, as part of the bicentennial celebrations, the Yorkshire-born artist returns with Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look, promising to be a fascinating display documenting Hockney’s love of Piero della Francesca’s works, especially The Baptism of Christ, which he describes as “wonderful pictures that are marvellous and exciting to look at, that delight you”.

In 1853, a radically minded select committee accused the gallery of having no clear plan to develop the collection, and produced a 1,000-page report, which condensed the evidence offered by hundreds of witnesses, recommending a new management structure. There would now be an all-powerful position of director, rather than a keeper, and the first to hold this post in 1855 was Sir Charles Eastlake (affectionately “Sir Chas”). Avery-Quash told me that “the National Gallery we have today is largely due to Sir Chas’s vision” and is fond of an insightful character assessment by his friend, the architect and writer Charles Robert Cockerell RA, who said that “Eastlake is always admirable, through good and evil report. His Presidency [of the Royal Academy from 1850] is invaluable—earnest, steady, most judicious, business-like, kind, full of tact, consideration and even policy—but of an honest and wholly unselfish policy, and when need be, bold, as backed by honesty.”

Eastlake, who likewise displayed these attributes as the first director of the National Gallery, and together with his wife Elizabeth Rigby, art historian and translator of important German art historical texts, became the leading light of the London art world; indeed one contemporary described him as the “Alpha and Omega” of the Victorian cultural scene. During his decade in office, Eastlake purchased over 150 paintings, expanding the original gentleman’s art collection into a collection able to tell visually the story of Western European painting from its origins in mid-13th century Italy. Many of Eastlake’s early Italian and Netherlandish picture acquisitions were considered at the time “unsightly” and not the best teaching models for aspiring artists to follow—and as president of the Royal Academy, Eastlake doubtless agreed—but wearing his other cap of office, as director of the National Gallery, he explained that such pictures were critical as milestones in the history he was attempting to narrate, particularly the “rude beginnings” through which Italian art “developed” over the centuries, reaching its perceived apogee in the era of Raphael and his contemporaries.

As the 19th century became the 20th, the historical ambition of the directors, benefactors, and curators at the gallery meant that the collection was on solid ground. The National Gallery was now the custodian of a world-respected repository of Old Masters, as well as special paintings from both before and after Raphael. But the thing about art collections, whether public or private, is that even an impressive one may begin to look rather staid if it doesn’t keep up with contemporary fashions in taste and collecting. At certain later points in its history, the gallery has not been as advanced in its collecting as Eastlake had been when he pioneered the public purchase of early Italian art. A good example of the gallery falling behind the collecting curve came during the early 20th century, when some of its more conservative-minded trustees were slow to appreciate the merits of modern French art and could not conceive of them adorning the gallery’s “hallowed precincts”. To push their thinking forwards, Samuel Courtauld, a textile industrialist, Francophile and man about town, gave a large sum of money towards the purchase specifically of exciting French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting for the national collection. His £50,000 gift brought important paintings into the gallery by Edouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat and Vincent van Gogh, including the joyous Sunflowers (1888), bought in 1924, the gallery’s centenary year.

Later in the century, extremely wealthy philanthropists bolstered the collection further. Most significantly, in 1986, Sir Paul Getty established an endowment fund in his name to the tune of £50m, which enabled the gallery to purchase, amongst other treasures, Caravaggio’s Baroque masterpiece Boy bitten by a Lizard (1594-95). This painting is one of two versions that Caravaggio made on this subject (the other now held by Fondazione Roberto Longhi in Florence), which some scholars believe to depict either the artist’s ruffle-haired lover and model Mario Minniti, or else a stylised self-portrait with fingers splayed like an artist holding a palette while painting. Boy bitten by a Lizard is now one of the major paintings by the leading late 16th-century artist in a public collection outside Italy.

As the purse-strings that controlled expenditure in the arts were tightened under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, the gallery thought creatively about new ways to secure great paintings and started to complete joint purchases to share costs. In 1988, Nicolas Poussin’s The Finding of Moses (1651)—which utilised a Nativity scene format to draw links between Moses and Christ, and found extraordinary contrasts between deep pockets of dramatic darkness and fiercely coloured dresses in reds, blues and yellows—as jointly bought by the gallery and its sister institution in Cardiff, Amgueddfa Cymru—National Museum Wales.

From the mid-1990s, grants from the newly established Heritage Lottery Fund added an important source of acquisition funding for the gallery. In 1995, Georges Seurat’s The Channel of Gravelines, Grand Fort-Philippe (1890) was acquired for £16m, with £8m coming from a Heritage Lottery Fund grant. In 1997, George Stubbs’s Whistlejacket (around 1762) was acquired for £11m with nearly £8.3m coming from the fund.

In 2014, funds from the Sir Paul Getty endowment were bolstered by a grant from The American Friends of the National Gallery to acquire George Bellows’s Men of the Docks (1912), a soberingly realist rendering of a group of day labourers, wearing overcoats smeared in filth, standing at a dock in Brooklyn together with some draft horses, for some $25.5m. For the first time, a work by an artist who made their mark across the Atlantic was included in the collection. At this point the collection changed its strapline to say that the National Gallery was a collection of paintings reflecting the “Western European tradition”, rather than being Western European pictures per se.

More works by women

Each of these keystone acquisitions are of work by male artists: perhaps gentleman’s collections, like some gentleman’s clubs, can take a couple of hundred years to welcome women wholeheartedly. But there are some landmark works in the collection by women artists, including the French Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot’s popular and idyllic Summer’s Day (around 1879), acquired through the Sir Hugh Lane Bequest in 1917. In 2018, Artemisia Gentileschi’s now much-loved Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (1615-17) made its way to Trafalgar Square, and was sent on a ground-breaking tour to unusual locations round the UK, including a public library, a girls’ school and a female prison.

Most recently, and especially during this bicentennial year, the gallery has made loud noises on the diversification of its collection as it seeks to include more works by women artists. Eva Gonzalès’s The Full-length Mirror (1869-70), an atmospheric depiction of the artist’s sister Jeanne facing her reflection, which was made just after Gonzalès became Edouard Manet’s only formal pupil (the gallery, by the way, has a portrait by the master of his pupil), was brought into the collection earlier this year in part by the generosity of three women patrons.