National Gallery

The National Gallery is an art museum in London. It is located at the northern end of Trafalgar Square and is considered one of the most comprehensive and important art galleries in the world. The government issued here painting collection comprises about 2,300 works from the 13th to the 19th century. Admission to the permanent painting exhibition is free. The house has 4.9 million visitors one of the most visited museums in the world.

History

The National Gallery was launched in 1824, after the British government had bought the collection of Russian banker John Julius Angerstein. In the first 14 years, the images were temporarily housed in Anger stone house. Later followed by further donations from Sir George Beaumont and William Holwell Carr to build with the condition a more suitable building for the collection, which was done in 1838. Italian Paintings from the 15th and 16th centuries was now the heart of the fledgling collection and over the next 30 years should mainly the works of masters of the late Renaissance to follow.

Middle of the 19th century changed the collection, as the first director Charles Eastlake used his absolute authority, earlier works to create native of northern countries and Italian masters. The third director Frederic Burton preferred the art of the 18th century and made some important acquisitions from English private collections, such as The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger. After the National Gallery continued to grow many British works were in 1897 transferred to the Tate Gallery.

1906 Venus was acquired as the first really important work of the National Art Collections Fund before the mirror of Diego Velázquez, as will many others. The canvas of this image was taken in 1914 by Mary Richardson, to protest against the mistreatment of women. In the 19th century the National Gallery had no works by contemporary artists, but this changed after Hugh Lane, 1917 inherited some impressionistic images to the collection. A fund for the purchase of modern paintings established by Samuel Courtauld in 1924, about the pictures of the bathers were purchased at Asnieres by Georges Seurat. When the Second World War broke out, the collection was housed in a safe mine near the town of Blaenau Ffestiniog, North Wales, during the building served as a concert hall in London.

In recent years, personalities like Lord Sainsbury, after the Sainsbury Wing is named, Lord Rothschild and Sir Paul Getty major sponsor of the National Gallery.

The building

The building on Trafalgar Square was built in 1837 by William Wilkins. He had it integrates the pillars of the portico of Carlton House destroyed in the facade. While it was originally planned, and the Academy of Fine Arts ( Royal Academy of Arts) with accommodate, the building proved to be too small so that the Royal Academy had to move 1868 in the Burlington House, which is their home still today. Although now more space was created, it was not enough time for the collection of fast-growing, and so an east wing was built 1872-1876 added. Built from the classical architect Edward Middleton Barry, he is with his octagonal vestibule probably the greatest part of the Victorian building. Although in the following years until today, piece by piece parts were on or rebuilt, the symmetrical plan of Edward Barry remained intact.

The most important additional construction in recent years is the Sainsbury Wing, built in 1991 and designed by Robert Venturi, a leading post-modern architects. In his paintings of the Renaissance is issued.

The Collection

Excerpts from the Collection:

• Joachim Beuckelaer The Four Elements
• Sandro Botticelli, Venus and Mars.
• Agnolo Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time
• Canaletto
• Paul Cézanne
• Philippe de Champaigne, Cardinal Richelieu
• John Constable, The Hay Wain
• Wilton Diptych
• Willem Drost, Portrait of a Young Woman with her Hands Folded on a Book
• Jan van Eyck, Arnolfini Wedding
• Thomas Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Andrews
• Luca Giordano, Perseus turning Phineas and his Followers to Stone
• Vincent van Gogh, Vincent's Chair with Pipe
• Frans Hals, Vanitas
• William Hogarth, Marriage à la Mode
• Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors
• Thomas Jones, Wall in Naples
• Frederic Leighton, Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna is carried in procession through the streets of Florence

• Édouard Manet, Music in the Tuileries Gardens
• Claude Monet
• Antonello da Messina, image of a man
• Raphael, Portrait of Pope Julius II
• Pierre- Auguste Renoir
• Rembrandt van Rijn, The Feast of Belshazzar, and two self-portraits
• Raphael, Pope Julius II, Madonna with the Carnation
• Georges Seurat
• George Stubbs
• Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne
• J. M. W. Turner
• Paolo Uccello
• Diego Velázquez, Christ in the house of Mary and Martha, Venus in front of the mirror
• Verrocchio, Tobias and the Angel
• Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin of the Rocks, drawing of The Virgin Mary and Child, the Archangel Uriel and John the Baptist
• Joseph Wright of Derby, The Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump

The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck

Claude Monet: Water Lily Pond

The Fighting Temeraire by William Turner