The cruel and unusual punishment that the poor old National Portrait Gallery has suffered over its lifetime amounts to a sort of architectural torture. When it opened in 1896, architect Ewan Christian presented London with a great Florentine palazzo (with a Byzantine chapel-like staircase attached) to tell the story of a nation in its imperial pomp. Yet its rooms were soon divided and divided again, ceilings were lowered, floors raised, their decorative mosaics hidden.
Worse was what happened to the galleries’ lighting. Originally open only in the daytime with no artificial lights, the NPG was full of windows and skylights. Pragmatics, infills, changing fashion, and the threat of wartime bombing saw skylights painted over, windows permanently shuttered or entirely bricked up and their architraves removed. To add injury to insult, it was bombed nonetheless.
