The National Gallery houses one of the greatest collections of European painting in the world. With paintings ranging from 1250 to 1900, the collection includes work by Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Gainsborough, Turner, Cezanne and Van Gogh. London's National Gallery displays Western European painting from about 1250-1900.
You'll love seeing work by Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Gainsborough, Turner, Renoir, Cezanne and Van Gogh. There are special exhibitions, lectures, video and audio-visual programmes, guided tours and holiday events for children and adults.
Dominating the north of the square is the national gallery, housing britains finest collection of european from early renasance to 1900, the gallery was founded in 1824, when a private collection of 38 paintings was aqquired by the british goverment for £60,000 and exhitbited in the owners house at 100 pall mall. As the collection grew a new building to accomodate all the works of art, which resulted in the national gallery.
The National Gallery in London, founded in 1824, houses a rich collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900 in its home on Trafalgar Square. The gallery is a non-departmental public body; its collection belongs to the public of the United Kingdom and entry to the main collection (though not some special exhibitions) is free of charge. Unlike comparable art museums such as the Louvre in Paris or the Museo del Prado in Madrid, the National Gallery was not formed by nationalising an existing royal or princely art collection. It came into being when the British government bought 36 paintings from the banker John Julius Angerstein in 1824. After that initial purchase the Gallery was shaped mainly by its early directors, notably Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, and by private donations, which comprise two thirds of the collection. The resulting collection is small in size, compared with many European national galleries, but encyclopaedic in scope; most major developments in Western painting "from Giotto to Cézanne" are represented with important works. It used to be claimed that this was one of the few national galleries that had all its works on permanent exhibition, but this is no longer the case. The present building, the third to house the National Gallery, was designed by William Wilkins from 1832–8. Only the façade onto Trafalgar Square remains essentially unchanged from this time, as the building has been expanded piecemeal throughout its history. The building often came under fire for its perceived aesthetic deficiencies and lack of space; the latter problem led to the establishment of the Tate Gallery for British art in 1897.
The Sainsbury Wing, an extension to the west by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, is a notable example of Postmodernist architecture in Britain. The current Director of the National Gallery is Nicholas Penny.
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