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National Gallery, London

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Architecture; Art

   CAPTION: The National Gallery

         Established       1824
          Location         Trafalgar Square, London WC2, England, United Kingdom
       Visitor figures     4,200,000 (2005)
          Director         Charles Saumarez Smith
   Nearest tube station(s) Charing Cross, Embankment, Leicester Square
           Website         www.nationalgallery.org.uk

   The National Gallery is an art gallery in London, located on the north
   side of Trafalgar Square. It houses Western European paintings from
   1250 to 1900 from the national art collection of Great Britain. The
   collection of 2,300 paintings belongs to the British public, and entry
   to the main collection is free, although there are charges for entry to
   special exhibitions.

   Despite having been founded without an existing royal collection on
   which to build, the National Gallery has grown to be a collection of
   international renown since its foundation in 1824. It was shaped mainly
   by its early directors, including Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, and by
   private donations, which comprise two thirds of the collection.
   Although small in comparison with other national art collections such
   as the Louvre, the National Gallery is notable for covering a broad
   art-historical scope with paintings of consistently high quality,
   making it possible to trace every major development in Western painting
   from the Early Renaissance to the Post-impressionists through its
   collection. The Gallery's 19th-century origins have, however, resulted
   in particularly strong holdings of the Italian and Dutch schools, while
   historically it was slow on the uptake of modern art.

   The National Gallery has been housed in three buildings, all of which
   have been deemed inadequate for their purpose at one point or another.
   The present building, begun by William Wilkins, has undergone several
   extensions, most notably by E. M. Barry and Robert Venturi. The current
   director is Charles Saumarez Smith.

History

Founding bequests and early history

   Compared with the majority of European nation states, Great Britain was
   a late starter in establishing a national art collection open to the
   public. Whereas the great galleries of continental Europe, such as the
   Uffizi in Florence or the Prado in Madrid, were built on royal or
   princely art collections that had been nationalised, the British Royal
   Collection remained in the possession of the sovereign, dispersed
   across various royal palaces. The private collection assembled by Sir
   Robert Walpole at Houghton Hall in Norfolk was of comparable quality to
   the monarch's, and when his descendants threatened to put it up for
   sale in 1777 there were calls for it to be bought by the government.
   John Wilkes, speaking to the House of Commons, suggested that a
   national gallery be established as an adjunct to the British Museum.
   The government paid no heed to 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 St Petersburg. Later, in
   1811, London became home to a collection intended for a never-realised
   national gallery of Poland when it was bequeathed in the will of one of
   one of the men who had assembled it, Sir Francis Bourgeois, to Dulwich
   College (it now resides in the Dulwich Picture Gallery). But with the
   college being a private institution in a South London suburb, the
   British capital remained without a state-owned national gallery in a
   central location until after the Napoleonic Wars.
   The Raising of Lazarus by Sebastiano del Piombo, part of Angerstein's
   collection and officially the first painting to enter the National
   Gallery.
   Enlarge
   The Raising of Lazarus by Sebastiano del Piombo, part of Angerstein's
   collection and officially the first painting to enter the National
   Gallery.

   The unexpected repayment of a war debt by Austria finally moved the
   hitherto reluctant British government to establish a National Gallery,
   just as the art collection of John Julius Angerstein, a Russian émigré
   banker who had died the previous year, appeared on the market. On April
   2, 1824, the House of Commons voted to purchase 38 of Angerstein's
   paintings, including works by Raphael and Hogarth's Marriage à-la-Mode
   series, for £60,000. The National Gallery opened to the public on May
   10, 1824, housed in Angerstein's former townhouse on No. 100 Pall Mall.
   Angerstein's paintings were joined in 1826 by those from the collection
   of Sir George Beaumont, which he had offered to give to the nation
   three years previously on the condition that a suitable building would
   be found to house them, and in 1828 by the Reverend William Holwell
   Carr's bequest of 34 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.
   100 Pall Mall, the home of the National Gallery from 1824 to 1834.
   Enlarge
   100 Pall Mall, the home of the National Gallery from 1824 to 1834.

   The National Gallery at Pall Mall was frequently overcrowded and hot
   and its diminutive size in comparison with the Louvre in Paris was the
   cause of national embarrassment. Subsidence in No. 100 caused the
   Gallery to move briefly to No. 105 Pall Mall, which the novelist
   Anthony Trollope called a "dingy, dull, narrow house, ill-adapted for
   the exhibition of the treasures it held". In 1832 construction began on
   a new building by William Wilkins on the site of the King's Mews in
   Charing Cross, in an area that had been transformed over the 1820s into
   Trafalgar Square. The location was a significant one, described by the
   trustee Sir Robert Peel as being "in the very gangway of London" and
   thus equally accessible by people of all social classes. Later, in the
   1850s, there were calls for a change of location, due in part to the
   pollution of central London and partly because of the failings of
   Wilkins's building, but it was felt that moving the National Gallery
   from Trafalgar Square would undermine public access.

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 Russell, was the Keeper of Paintings at
   the Gallery, Sir Charles Lock Eastlake.

   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. Eastlake 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 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 Eastlake.

   The third director, Sir Frederick William Burton, laid the foundations
   of the collection of 18th-century art and made several outstanding
   purchases from English private collections, including The Ambassadors
   by Hans Holbein the Younger. The last decisive influence in the shaping
   of the Gallery was the founding of the National Gallery of British Art,
   or the Tate Gallery as it was already being called, in 1897. The
   stipulation that paintings by British artists born after 1790 should be
   given to the Tate allowed the National Gallery to shed many of the
   superfluous works in its collection, while keeping those by Hogarth,
   Turner and Constable. As the building at the time was still comprised
   of only 15 rooms, this de-cluttering exercise proved to be a boon to
   the Gallery, allowing it to display its paintings by the British School
   with better focus than was previously possible.

The early twentieth century

   In 1906 Velázquez's Rokeby Venus, the first high-profile acquisition by
   the National Art Collections Fund, was the first of many artworks
   bought by the Fund for the National Gallery. In a rare example of the
   political protest for which Trafalgar Square is famous occurring in the
   National Gallery, the canvas was slashed on May 10, 1914 by Mary
   Richardson, a campaigner for women's suffrage, in protest against the
   arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst the previous day. Later that month another
   suffragette attacked five Bellinis, causing the Gallery to close until
   the start of the First World War, when the Women's Social and Political
   Union called for an end to violent acts drawing attention to their
   plight.

   The bequest of 42 paintings given by the chemist Dr Ludwig Mond in 1909
   was one of the largest ever received by the gallery and strengthened
   its holdings in the Italian old masters. During the 19th century the
   National Gallery contained no works by a contemporary artist, but this
   situation was belatedly amended by Sir Hugh Lane's bequest of
   Impressionist paintings in 1917. A fund for the purchase of modern
   paintings established by Samuel Courtauld in 1924 bought Seurat's
   Bathers at Asnières and other notable modern works for the nation; in
   1934 these transferred to the National Gallery from the Tate.

The Gallery in World War II

   At the outbreak of World War II the paintings were exiled to safety in
   Manod Quarry, near the town of Ffestiniog in North Wales. Originally
   the director Kenneth Clark hoped to ship the paintings from Wales to
   Canada, but he received a telegram from Winston Churchill exhorting him
   to “bury them in caves or in cellars, but not a picture shall leave
   these islands”. In the meantime the pianist Myra Hess gave daily
   recitals in the empty building to raise public morale at a time when
   every concert hall in London was closed. In 1941 a request from an
   artist to see Rembrandt's Portrait of Margaretha de Geer 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.

Post-war developments

   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 remarkable purchases in this
   period would have been impossible without the major public appeals
   backing them, including The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John
   the Baptist by Leonardo da Vinci (bought in 1962), Titian’s Death of
   Actaeon (1972) and Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks (2004). Other
   campaigns, such as that to acquire Titian's Portrait of a Young Man for
   the nation in 2005, have been unsuccessful. Private individuals have
   continued to give their support, the most generous of whom was the late
   Sir Paul Getty, who in 1985 gave the Gallery £50 million towards
   acquisitions. Ironically, the institution that posed the biggest threat
   to the Gallery's acquisitions policy was (and remains) the extremely
   well-endowed J. Paul Getty Museum in California, established by Getty's
   estranged father. Also in 1985 Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover and
   his brothers, the Hon. Simon Sainsbury and Sir Timothy Sainsbury, made
   a donation that enabled the construction of the Sainsbury Wing.

   In 1996 it was decided that 1900 would be the 'cut-off date' for
   paintings in the National Gallery and the following year more than 60
   post-1900 paintings from the National Gallery collection were given to
   the Tate on a long-term loan, in return for works by Gauguin and
   others. The agreement was remarkable for marking an end to a century of
   cool relations between the two galleries. Future expansion of the
   National Gallery may see the return of twentieth-century paintings to
   its walls. Another gap in the collection was addressed by a bequest
   from Sir Denis Mahon in 1999, an art historian and collector of Italian
   Baroque paintings at a time when they were considered beyond the pale
   by most in the profession. This prejudice extended to the National
   Gallery trustees, who declined the offer to buy a Guercino from his
   collection for £200 in 1945 (in 2003 it was evaluated at £4m). Mahon
   left the National Gallery 26 of his paintings, including works by Guido
   Reni and Correggio, on the condition that it never charge for
   admission.

Controversies

   The restoration of Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne from 1967 to 1968 was
   one of the most controversial ever undertaken at the National Gallery.
   Enlarge
   The restoration of Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne from 1967 to 1968 was
   one of the most controversial ever undertaken at the National Gallery.

   One of the most persistent criticisms of the National Gallery,
   alongside the perceived inadequacies of the building, has been of its
   policy regarding the conservation of paintings. The Gallery's
   detractors accuse it of having an over-zealous approach to restoration
   and of turning a deaf ear to criticism. 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 recent
   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.

   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 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 them with 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, but some in conservation circles
   remain unhappy that the Gallery's attitude towards restoration has
   changed little since Ruhemann's time.

   The National Gallery has also come under fire for misattributing
   paintings for various reasons. Kenneth Clark's decision in 1939 to
   relabel a group of paintings by anonymous artists in the Venetian
   school as works by Giorgione (a crowd-pulling artist due to the rarity
   of his paintings) caused an outrage and made him deeply unpopular with
   his own staff, who locked him out of the library. More recently, the
   attribution of a 17th-century painting of Samson and Delilah (bought in
   1980) to Rubens has been contested by a group of art historians, who
   believe that the National Gallery has not admitted to the mistake to
   avoid the embarrassment of those who were involved in the purchase,
   many of whom still work for the Gallery.

The building

   First floor plan of the National Gallery, showing the piecemeal way in
   which galleries have been added
   Enlarge
   First floor plan of the National Gallery, showing the piecemeal way in
   which galleries have been added
   Wilkins's façade at night, illuminated for an event to promote the
   launch of a Pepsi commercial
   Enlarge
   Wilkins's façade at night, illuminated for an event to promote the
   launch of a Pepsi commercial

   The first suggestion for a National Gallery on Trafalgar Square came
   from John Nash, the architect of the Square. A competition for the site
   was eventually held in 1832, for which Nash submitted a design with C.
   R. Cockerell as his co-architect. Nash's popularity was waning by this
   time, however, and the commission was awarded to William Wilkins, who
   was involved in the selection of the site and submitted some drawings
   at the last moment. Wilkins described in a letter to the Viscount
   Goderich his desire to build a "Temple of the Arts, nurturing
   contemporary art through historical example", but his plans were
   hampered by parsimony and compromise. From its completion the building
   was generally regarded as an unsatisfying focal point for the northern
   end of Trafalgar Square. The main criticisms of the façade were that it
   was excessively long, without sufficient bulk, and fussy in its
   ornamentation. (The arrangement of turrets and a dome on the roofline
   has been described by the architectural historian Sir John Summerson as
   being "like the clock and vases on a mantelpiece, only less useful".)
   The building's failings are best understood by examining the
   constraints imposed on Wilkins's creativity by the site and other
   demands of the commission.

   Wilkins would have preferred to build the Gallery farther to the south
   than the current building, but this would have eliminated the protected
   vista of the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. A further problem was
   that a workhouse and a barracks stood immediately behind Wilkin's
   building. Not only did this confine it to being one room deep, but
   there was also a public right of way through the site of the National
   Gallery to these buildings, which Wilkins was forced to incorporate
   into his design. Hence the western and eastern porticoes of the
   building, with columns recovered from the demolished Carlton House –
   their reuse was yet another stipulation of the commission. Also
   recycled are the relief sculptures on the façade, originally intended
   for Nash's Marble Arch but abandoned due to his financial problems.

   Even the space given to the National Gallery inside the building was
   ungenerous as the eastern half of the building was occupied by the
   Royal Academy until 1868, when it moved to its present home in
   Burlington House. The building was the undoing of Wilkins's reputation
   and two years before its completion it was mocked by A. W. N. Pugin in
   his influential tract against classical architecture, Contrasts. The
   first significant alteration made to the building was Sir James
   Pennethorne’s central vestibule, built in 1860-1, but exhibition space
   remained at a premium as the collections continued to grow.

   Unsurprisingly, several attempts were made either to completely remodel
   the National Gallery (as suggested by Sir Charles Barry in 1853), or to
   move it to more capacious premises in Kensington, where the air was
   also cleaner. In 1867 Barry’s son Edward Middleton Barry proposed to
   replace the Wilkins building with a massive classical building with
   four domes. The scheme was a failure and contemporary critics denounced
   the exterior as "a strong plagiarism upon St Paul's Cathedral". With
   the demolition of the workhouse, however, Barry was able to build a
   suitably grand eastern extension from 1872 to 1876. Barry’s East Wing,
   with the huge octagonal tribune at its centre, compensated for the
   underwhelming architecture of the Wilkins building and remains the most
   monumental part of the building. Its strong axial plan was followed by
   all subsequent additions to the Gallery for a century, resulting in a
   building of clear symmetry.
   The Staircase Hall, designed by Sir John Taylor
   Enlarge
   The Staircase Hall, designed by Sir John Taylor

   Pennethorne’s alterations were all but demolished for the next phase of
   building, a scheme by Sir John Taylor extending northwards of the main
   entrance. Taylor’s glass-domed entrance vestibule had an opulent
   decorative scheme by the Crace firm, hidden under austere white paint
   and marble cladding in the Second World War, and recreated during
   restoration in 2005. On the south wall hangs Frederic, Lord Leighton’s
   painting of Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna carried in Procession through
   the Streets of Florence, illustrating a scene from Vasari’s Lives of
   the Artists. The quirky floor mosaics were designed by Boris Anrep from
   1928 to 1952 and include, at the centre of the room, a depiction of
   luminaries of the era in classical guises (The Awakening of the Muses),
   while the outlying mosaics illustrate Modern Virtues, The Labours of
   Life and The Pleasures of Life (including Christmas pudding).

   Later additions to the west came more steadily but maintained the
   coherence of the building by mirroring Barry’s cross-axis plan to the
   east. The use of dark marble for doorcases and skirting-boards was also
   continued, giving the extensions a degree of internal consistency with
   the older rooms. The classical style was still in use at the Gallery as
   late as 1929, when the Duveen gallery with its coffered, barrel-vaulted
   ceiling was built. The symmetry of the building was broken by the North
   Galleries, an unloved modernist extension which opened in 1975. The
   1980s and '90s saw a progamme of refurbishing the entire principal
   floor, beginning in 1985-6 with the Barry rooms. This was also an
   attempt to reconcile the disparate post-war buildings with the main
   building by decorating them in a 19th-century style.

The Sainsbury Wing and later additions

   The Sainsbury Wing as seen from Trafalgar Square
   Enlarge
   The Sainsbury Wing as seen from Trafalgar Square

   The most important addition to the building in recent years has been
   the Sainsbury Wing, designed by the leading postmodernist architect
   Robert Venturi to house the collection of Renaissance paintings and
   built in 1991. Building on the site had been delayed after Prince
   Charles infamously denounced a still evolving design for a modernist
   extension to the gallery by the architects Ahrends, Burton and Koralek
   as "a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant
   friend". The proposed extension then under consideration would have
   included a block of offices under the galleries. This proposal went as
   far as the display of a scale model at the Royal Academy in 1983. Only
   after the Sainsbury family's 1985 donation did a building exclusively
   for use by the National Gallery become financially feasible. Given the
   sensitivity of the site it is unsurprising that the Sainsbury Wing is
   subdued by Venturi's standards, superficially blending in with the
   Wilkins façade whilst offering a quirky comment on classical
   architectural idiom.

   In contrast with the rich ornamentation of the rooms that either date
   from or emulate the 19th century, the galleries in the Sainsbury Wing
   are deliberately pared-down and intimate, to suit the smaller scale of
   many of the paintings. Sir John Soane's toplit galleries for the
   Dulwich Picture Gallery are the main inspiration for these rooms, and
   the white walls with grey pietra serena stone details (for door
   surrounds etc.) are a nod to the Florentine Renaissance architect
   Filippo Brunelleschi. The northernmost galleries align with Barry's
   central axis, so that there is a single continuous vista down the whole
   length of the Gallery. Looking towards the Sainsbury Wing from the main
   building, this prospect is given added drama by the use of false
   perspective as the paired columns flanking each opening gradually
   diminish in size until the visitor reaches the focal point of the vista
   (as of 2006), an altarpiece by Cima of The Incredulity of St Thomas.
   Venturi's postmodernist approach to architecture is in full evidence at
   the Sainsbury Wing, with its stylistic quotations from buildings as
   disparate as the clubhouses on Pall Mall, the Scala Regia in the
   Vatican, Victorian warehouses and Ancient Egyptian temples.

   Following the pedestrianisation of Trafalgar Square, the Gallery is
   currently engaged in a 'master plan' to convert the vacated office
   space on the ground floor into public space. The plan will also fill in
   disused courtyards and make use of land acquired from the adjoining
   National Portrait Gallery in St Martin's Place, which it gave to the
   National Gallery in exchange for land for its 2000 extension. The first
   phase, the East Wing Project designed by Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones,
   opened to the public in 2004. This provided a new ground level entrance
   from Trafalgar Square. The main entrance was also refurbished, and
   reopened in September 2005. Possible future projects include a "West
   Wing Project" roughly symmetrical with the East Wing Project, which
   would provide a future ground level entrance, and the public opening of
   some small rooms at the far eastern end of the building acquired as
   part of the swap with the National Portrait Gallery. This might include
   a new public staircase in the bow on the eastern façade. No timetable
   has been announced for these additional projects.

Collection highlights

   Paintings in the National Gallery include:
     * The Wilton Diptych
     * Paolo Uccello, The Battle of San Romano
     * Piero della Francesca, The Baptism of Christ
     * Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait
     * Sandro Botticelli, Venus and Mars
     * Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin of the Rocks, The Burlington House
       Cartoon
     * Michelangelo, The Entombment, The Manchester Madonna
     * Raphael, Portrait of Pope Julius II, The Madonna of the Pinks, The
       Mond Crucifixion
     * Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, The Death of Actaeon
     * Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors
     * Agnolo Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time
     * Caravaggio, Boy Bitten by a Lizard, Supper at Emmaus, Salome with
       the head of John the Baptist
     * Peter Paul Rubens, Le Chapeau de Paille, The Judgement of Paris
       (two versions), Landscape with Het Steen

     * Diego Velázquez, The Rokeby Venus
     * Anthony van Dyck, Equestrian Portrait of Charles I
     * Rembrandt, Belshazzar's Feast, two self portraits
     * Canaletto, A Regatta on the Grand Canal, The Stonemason's Yard
     * William Hogarth, Marriage à-la-Mode
     * George Stubbs, Whistlejacket
     * Thomas Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Andrews
     * Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump
     * J. M. W. Turner, The Fighting Temeraire, Rain, Steam and Speed
     * John Constable, The Hay Wain
     * Paul Cézanne, Les Grandes Beigneuses
     * Claude Monet, The Water-Lily Pond, The Thames Below Westminster
     * Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Umbrellas, Boating on the Seine
     * Georges Seurat, Bathers at Asnières
     * Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers, Van Gogh's Chair

   Les Grandes Beigneuses by Paul Cézanne
   Enlarge
   Les Grandes Beigneuses by Paul Cézanne

Directors

                Director                           Served
   Sir Charles Lock Eastlake PRA       2 July 1855 – 24 December 1865
   Sir William Boxall RA               13 February 1866 – 1874
   Sir Frederick William Burton        20 February 1874 – March 1894
   Sir Edward Poynter Bt PRA           April 1894 – 1904
   Sir Charles Holroyd                 11 June 1906 – June 1916
   Sir Charles Holmes                  4 August 1916 – December 1928
   Sir Augustus Daniel                 January 1929 – December 1933
   Sir Kenneth Clark                   January 1934 – December 1945
   Sir Philip Hendy                    January 1946 – December 1967
   Sir Martin Davies CBE Dlitt FBA FSA January 1968 – September 1973
   Sir Michael Levey MVO               October 1973 – December 1986
   Neil MacGregor                      January 1987 – May 2002
   Dr Charles Saumarez Smith           July 2002 – present

Associate artists

   Since 1989, the gallery has run a scheme that gives a studio to
   contemporary artists to create work based on the permanent collection.
   They usually hold the position of associate artist for two years and
   are given an exhibition in the National Gallery at the end of their
   tenure. The list of associate artists so far is as follows:
     * Paula Rego (1989–90)
     * Ken Kiff (1991–93)
     * Peter Blake (1994–96)
     * Ana Maria Pacheco (1997–99)
     * Ron Mueck (2000–02)
     * John Virtue (2003–05)
     * Alison Watt (2006–08)

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