Two hundred years ago the National Gallery opened for the first time. Roderick Conway Morris looks back at the milestones in the history of this great cutural landmark
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO A NATIONAL TREASURE
In 1779 the writer and collector Horace Walpole wandered through the rooms of Houghton Hall in Norfolk. The splendid Palladian house was built by his father Sir Robert Walpole – Britain’s first prime minister – to accommodate his superb personal collection of Old Masters, including works by Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Poussin, Luca Giordano and Murillo.
‘I have lived to see the glorious collection of the pictures that were the principal ornaments of the house, gone to the North Pole,’ Horace gloomily wrote to a friend, ‘where it will be burnt in a royal palace at the first insurrection.’
The sale of Walpole’s paintings to Catherine the Great of Russia, and their dispatch to St Petersburg, caused a national outcry, led by the radical MP John Wilkes, who condemned his fellow parliamentarians for failing to purchase this ‘national treasure’. Another observer declared that ‘the removal of the Houghton Pictures to Russia is, perhaps, one of the most striking instances that can be produced of the decline of the empire of Great Britain.’
In the previous century the nation had lost an even more magnificent collection, amassed by that greatest of royal connoisseurs Charles I. His paintings had been unceremoniously disposed of by Oliver Cromwell in the Commonwealth Sales of 1649-51, and many of them now adorn the Louvre and the Prado.
During the 18th and early 19th century almost every country in Europe created a national picture museum. The Louvre opened in 1793, the Rikjsmuseum (originally in The Hague, in 1800), and the Prado in Madrid in 1819. The National Gallery, established in 1824, was unusual in that it was a state rather than a royal institution.
George III, our third Hanoverian king, had wide cultural interests, and had bankrolled the Royal Academy in 1768. However, fifty years later members of the RA were the primary opponents of a national gallery. British artists feared the promotion of foreign Old Masters would damage the market for their wares. In 1799 the Irish painter James Barry was expelled
