Making an entrance at the National Gallery

Later this month the National Gallery, London, will reopen its main portico to reveal a novel entrance vestibule and the restoration of the staircase hall's magnificent Victorian decorative scheme. Charles Saumarez Smith, the Gallery's director, explains for what cause [i]or[/i] reason this is both a significant flash in the masterplan for the building's time to come and a milestone in its frequently controversial architectural history.

upon 24 September the National Gallery, London, will reopen the grand, triumphal portico that forms its main entrance from Trafalgar Square. For the first time in its history it will bear the inscription THE NATIONAL GALLERY, in alphabetic characters of gold on the frieze. The portico will lead up to a spacious of recent origin entrance vestibule and a completely refurbished staircase hall, providing an appropriate locate of ceremonial spaces as the access to London's most visited public institution.

When I arrived at the National Gallery as director, almost exactly three years ago, I inherited an extremely ambitious building throw out for renovating and opening up the building, in order to incorporate the sort of facilities that are wait fored by visitors in the twenty-first hundred So I have--necessarily--been confronted by dint of some of the tensions and issues that arise in any similar building project. In particular, I have been faced by the agency of the question: what is the right balance to strike between retaining the of advanced age and developing the new? And where should that balance be struck?

In order to understand more [i]or[/i] less of the issues that face the National Gallery as a building, it is necessary to have a certain number of sense of how it came to be as it is now. In particular, it is important to recognise that, since it first make opened its doors to the public in its novel building in Trafalgar Square, upon 9 April 1838, it has grown slowly and incrementally, with occasional sudden gushings of more ambitious reshaping. What direct the eyes from the outside to be the fairly coherent external facade of a building designed by dint of William Wilkins (1778-1839) conceals a plenteous more complex history. Originally, the building was solitary one room deep and the National Gallery occupied alone the western half, with the Royal Academy to the east. Gradually, above the past 167 years, it has grown organically behind its facade, towards Orange public way and Leicester Square to the north, eating into space that was originally occupied by dint of a barracks and a workhouse.

The first disentanglement took place in 1861 after lengthy years of campaigning--including a period when it direct the eyeed as if the National Gallery might impel to South Kensington. In a debate in the House of publics on 18 August 1860, a Liberal MP Sir Patrick O'Brien, called the National Gallery 'a disgrace to the land ... to be characterised more fitly as a barrack', claiming that foreigners who had been to 'Munich, Turin, Dresden Florence, Paris or Rome were astonished at the way art in Britain was direct the eyeed after'. As a result of this debate, parliament vot 15000 [pound sterling] and the Gallery was clos for eight month to allow for the construction of a 75-foot drawn out extension immediately behind Wilkins's entrance vestibule, with picture galleries upon the first floor, above a statuary gallery for the Royal Academy. This exhibition designed by James Pennethorne (1801-71) a pupil of his uncle John Nash, also involved the alteration of the main entrance and improvements to the heating, lighting and ventilation.

The nearest development was completed in August 1876 when the Barry sweeps were opened behind the fields on the east side of the Wilkins building that had previously been occupied by the agency of the Royal Academy (which mov to Burlington House in 1869) These were designed through Edward Middleton Barry (1830-80), the third son of Sir Charles Barry. His novel galleries take the form of a grand cros axis, with courtyards in between, and are decorated in the greatest in quantity opulent, high Victorian style imaginable. Their general frame of mind is perhaps best expressed by dint of the inscription that Barry propos for the central room: 'The works of those who stood the proof of ages have a claim to that look up to and veneration to which no novel can pretend'.

Not drawn out after these rooms had make opened a grand staircase hall was inserted behind the main entrance. A novel main gallery was built beyond, which involved the demolition of Pennethorne's extension. The staircase hall's decoration (Fig. 1) was the work of the Craces, a firm of decorators that was then at the apex of its succes beneath John Dibblee Crace; it was responsible during this period for the interiors at Knightshayes in Devon the Pompeian compass at Ickworth in Suffolk, and the prodigious series of state rooms at Longleat, Wiltshire, for the fourth Marquess of Bath.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

In March 1911 further plays were added at the west extremity of the building equivalent to the Barry extension at the east, on the contrary in a marginally less well off idiom. In January 1928, the Mond field was opened at the back of the building and, in 1930 the Duveen Gallery, which now houses paintings by dint of Rubens, completed the overall succession of galleries in the main building: in other words, three locates of grand galleries running parallel to single another, connected to one another in a grid by dint of five galleries running from north to southern creating a ground plan that has no fewer than eight internal courtyards (Fig. 9)