A Dance to the Music of Time.
The 200th Birthday of the National Gallery.
Robin Richmond, May 10, 2025.
The National Gallery has been all over the news this week. It opens to the public today.
Londoners and tourists alike have been confused, irritated, curious, disappointed and bummed out by what has been happening in Trafalgar Square for the last few years. I was one of these disenchanted Londoners. I felt like a rejected lover. It was nightmarish unloading large paintings to my show last October at the RWS Gallery in Whitcomb Street right next door. Roads were blocked off. There was nowhere to park a van. There were very long queues of angry visitors for the (amazing) Van Gogh show snaking in front of our gallery. Sometimes they were in high dudgeon, in such a raging fury that I had to act as a psychotherapist and apologist for the NG to complete strangers who felt cheated by London. They complained all the time. Thanks to Let’s Stop Oil, the activists who threw soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers there was draconian security. It was like an airport. No liquids. Stressful. Much loved galleries closed for the building work. Taking my young granddaughter to see her favourite painting during the building work, George Stubb’s rearing horse called Whistlejacket , which is one of the NG’s most loved paintings, was a damp squib. That room was closed. No whistlejacket. She was gutted. During Covid, when one could book special tours, she had spent a very happy morning galloping around, neighing in an empty gallery in front of him in a kind of equine bliss. Then, more recently, I tried to convince my little French grandsons that they would have a blast going on a treasure hunt in the gallery. No such luck. The free colouring books supplied in the past by the gallery to entice younger members of the public had gone. We had to spend our time counting bugs in 17th Century Dutch still lives. They loved the beetles, spiders and flies. The fruit not so much. We should have gone to the Natural History Museum.
So, I have been uncertain about the grand reopening this week. The National Gallery has always been my very favourite place to hang out since I moved to London from Rome in 1969. Almost like a member of my family. Nurturing, welcoming and best of all completely free. As a penny-counting art student I would pop in just to see one painting for half an hour. Bliss. When I started at Chelsea the following year, I spent four weeks in the Rembrandt room copying the 1661 portrait of Margaretha Trip, known as Margaretha de Geer in these post-feminist days. I still have my preliminary sketches somewhere in the wilds of my plan chest. The oil painting is lost in the mists of time.
It is obvious that I have a lot of emotion about the place. I owe my writing, teaching, broadcasting, and painting careers to it. In the 1980s, I gave talks to children in front of the paintings. One day, a parent, accompanying her child, asked if I had ever thought of writing about art for children. That was Introducing Michelangelo which led to my first adult book Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel, which itself has been much in the news this week after the Conclave and Pope Leo’s first Mass. I was hired as a Visiting Professor at the University of California on the back of these books. Then, I got a job on the radio on the wonderful arts programme, Kaleidoscope, out of my relationship with the gallery. I met wonderful museum people who were happy to share their knowledge with a young art historian and painter. I lapped it up like an eager little puppy. These memories are slightly embarrassing now that I am an old lag who has been around the art historical block a few times. The Head of Conservation at the time, Martin Wyld, was working on the Wilton Diptych. I would watch him at work and ask him tons of awkward questions about the ethics of restoration. Do you repaint or not? It’s still a thorny subject. Controversial. I got shot in the back many times for my views on the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel ceiling where I spent days up in the scaffolding with the restorers. I was there, on and off for 5 years, writing, photographing and being a general nuisance. The 3-year restoration of Piero della Francesca’s Nativity, in the National Gallery, on the walls now for the last 3 years, is emblematic of a certain attitude towards restoration espoused by the NG. Repainting is not frowned upon. This is somewhat troubling.
I know whereof I speak.
But today, sitting in the RWS gallery and watching happy crowds emerge from our august neighbour across the street I am buzzing. I have spent the last two days in almost empty galleries with a bunch of fellow writers, asking lots of questions of the indefatigable chief curator Christine Riding. and the very welcoming museum director Sir Gabriele Finaldi. It has been a huge treat and an enormous privilege. To see the galleries in the quiet is an experience I will not forget. Reuniting with old friends who have been off the walls in hospital, otherwise known as the Conservation Department, is very moving. The first image you see walking up the brilliantly light stairs of the new entrance is the huge Mud Sun by the contemporary Land artist Richard Long. This is, for me, a peculiar choice as an introduction to the collection. It does make one think of the matter and material substance of painting. Tempera, oil, pastel, charcoal, and ….mud.? Finger painting not brushes? I am not so sure. I suppose it’s an invitation to remember that we are in the 21 st century.
The National Gallery brings out the purist in me.
The newly configured stairs are magnificent. Looking through the once blacked-out windows, now transparent using high tech glass that blocks ultraviolet light, you see Admiral Nelson presiding over the square, like a giant puppet high on his pedestal. The newly refurbished Sainsbury Wing, completed by the architects Venturi Scott-Brown in 1991, looks very different today under the eyes and hands of Selldorf Architects. No “monstrous carbuncle” here in the immortal words of Prince Charles (as he was then). We enter through the Sainsbury Wing.
It feels clear-minded, spatially clear and uncluttered. The floors have been re-sanded. The benches remade and situated so as not to block the long views down the enfilades. The paintings have been cleaned. The walls have been repainted and the cloth textures restored. The ubiquitous red walls that dominate so many museums has been changed (almost completely) for pale grey, blue, and dark green. Very elegant. The lighting has been updated to the highest standard. Almost nothing is in the same place as it was before.
More importantly, the collection has been rethought. Paintings which have lived together for 200 years have moved into different spheres. They dance to their own beat. There is chronology, but more importantly there is a thematic approach. Paintings have been put together through chromatic connections and interesting juxtapositions. Artists are hung together through their influences on each other. What Christine Riding explains as “direction of travel” in the artistic sense, has been manifested in the way one actually moves through the galleries. A room of Turner and Constable is obviously united by their Englishness, but also by the colour chrome yellow. A central atrium has portraits of women by artists as different from one another as Edgar Degas and Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun, separated by a century. It’s surprising but coherent. The first painting we see after Richard Long’s sun is the late medieval Wilton Diptych of my youth. Opposite this masterpiece is Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks.
The 21st Century, the 16th Century, and the 14th Century. All together. It works.
Time Past and Time Future.
A Dance to the Music of Time.
Happy 200th birthday my old friend!