London's National Gallery started with 38 bought paintings
Continental capitals nationalized royal collections; Britain kept the Crown's pictures private. In 1824 Parliament paid £57,000 for banker John Julius Angerstein's thirty-eight canvases—Raphael and Hogarth among them—and a public gallery was born without a palace inventory.
On Trafalgar Square in Westminster, the National Gallery holds more than 2,300 paintings from the mid-thirteenth century to 1900; Gabriele Finaldi directs it. An exempt charity and Culture Department public body, it keeps the collection in trust for the British public with free entry to the main hang. Unlike many European peers, it did not seize a royal trove. Private gifts now supply about two-thirds of the works. The set is smaller than some national rivals yet spans Western painting "from Giotto to Cézanne" with major examples. William Wilkins's present building—the third home—began in 1832 and opened in 1838; only the Trafalgar façade stays largely original. Space pressure helped create the Tate Gallery for British art in 1897. The 1991 Sainsbury Wing by Venturi and Scott Brown is a landmark of British postmodern design.
Britain missed earlier chances: Walpole's collection, urged for purchase by John Wilkes in 1777, went to Catherine the Great and now sits in the Hermitage. Orléans pictures, a Polish-king assemblage offered by Desenfans, and dealer collections in 1803 were likewise declined; Dulwich Picture Gallery opened in 1814 from the Bourgeois bequest instead. Sir George Beaumont's gift of sixteen paintings, conditioned on buying Angerstein and finding a proper building, plus an Austrian war-debt repayment, finally unlocked the 1824 purchase. The gallery opened that year in Angerstein's Pall Mall townhouse, joined by Beaumont in 1826 and Holwell Carr's thirty-five pictures in 1831. Crowded, hot rooms embarrassed comparisons with the Louvre until Wilkins's Trafalgar site—between rich West End and poorer east—won on accessibility over South Kensington alternatives.
After chaotic trustee buying and a dry spell from 1847 to 1850, Commons pressure created a powerful directorship. Charles Lock Eastlake, preferred by Victoria, Albert, and Lord John Russell, chased early Italian and Northern "primitives," buying 148 pictures abroad and 46 at home, including Uccello's Battle of San Romano. Cleaning controversies erupted from 1846; J. Morris Moore's "Verax" letters in The Times attacked restorations even after an 1853 committee cleared the gallery. Vernon's British bequest and Turner's studio gift overwhelmed the Wilkins rooms; Turner's wish that two works hang beside Claude is still honored, though the full bequest splits between Trafalgar Square and Tate Britain's Clore Gallery. A democratic idea—pictures as "ennobling enjoyment" for all classes—outlasted the cramped Pall Mall years.
Source: National Gallery
