The National Gallery in London celebrates its 200th anniversary this year, a fact that seems at first to have little bearing on the spell it casts on visitors, who come in search of paintings both much older and much younger than the institution itself. But its history is a part of its charm, its existence, like its capaciousness, a miracle in retrospect. What began with 38 paintings, bought by the government from a banker, John Julius Angerstein, is now a collection comprising 2,300 works of art. In its early days, the gallery had no formal collection policy, its acquisitions dictated by the somewhat dusty tastes of its trustees; and even after it did, resistance was never far away. The promise in 1906 of a number of Impressionist paintings by the Irish art dealer, Sir Hugh Lane, horrified the old guard. Lord Redesdale, paternal grandfather of the Mitford sisters, got out the smelling salts at the mere mention of the name Renoir.
But the National Gallery has as much to tell us about shifting tastes as it does the story of art, its elegant spaces also embody our history in all its complexity, from slavery (between 1824 and 1880, at least 67 trustees and donors as well as some significant sitters and painters, had links to the slave trade) to suffrage (it was at the National Gallery that a suffragette called Mary Richardson slashed Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus with a meat cleaver in 1914). Think of the second world war, and you may picture its director, Kenneth Clark, moving its paintings to a slate quarry in Wales for their own protection; of the pianist Myra Hess giving her morale-boosting recitals in an empty building. Consider its Sainsbury Wing, which opened in 1991, from the far side of Trafalgar Square, and you may hear the sound of a prince railing against monstrous carbuncles; from this vantage point, you may also trace the irresistible rise of the so-called blockbuster show.
