National Gallery
The National Gallery
The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900.
It is one of the most visited art galleries in the world alongside the louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The gallery is a charity and its collection belongs to the government on behalf of the British public admission is free to the main collection.
Unlike most European collections that were former royal or aristocratic collections, the National gallery was founded from government purchases and bequests notably the original founding purchase of 38 paintings from the heirs of John Julius Angerstein in 1824.
The collection grew from subsequent donations of works and purchases although this last method is now very difficult due to the high value of Art, two thirds of the collection is comprised of donated works. The resulting collection is small in size, compared with many European national galleries, but encyclopaedic in scope; most major developments in Western painting from Giotto to Cézanne are represented with important works.
The present building is the third to house the National Gallery and was designed by William Wilkins from 1832 to 1838, at the time it was very unpopular and was labelled weak and lacking in space. Only the façade onto Trafalgar Square remains essentially unchanged from this time, as the building has been expanded piecemeal throughout its history. This lack of space led to the establishment of the Tate Gallery for British art in 1897.
The Sainsbury Wing, which is an extension to the west, is by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, This structure is a notable example of Postmodernist architecture in Britain. The current Director of the Gallery is Gabriele Finaldi.
The National Gallery houses the national collection of paintings in the Western European tradition from the 13th to the 19th centuries. It is on show 361 days a year, free of charge.