Stand in the Corinthian portico of the National Gallery’s main building and look due south beyond Nelson’s Column into Whitehall. Your gaze lights upon Hubert Le Sueur’s Baroque equestrian statue of King Charles I, and if your eyesight is especially keen, you might just glimpse a projecting corner of Inigo Jones’s Banqueting Hall. In this trio of eye-catchers lies the fons et origo of our national collection, at least according to Jonathan Conlin in the opening pages of The Nation’s Mantelpiece.
For scarcely had Charles stepped out from the Banqueting Hall for his beheading in 1649 than his stupendous assemblage of pictures, with its Raphaels, Titians and Mantegnas, was broken up and sold. Thus, unlike Paris, Florence or St Petersburg, London possessed nothing in the way of a princely gallery, whether inherited by the city, as in the case of the Uffizi, or appropriated by a hostile regime, as with the Hermitage, around which to build a major public collection. The cupboard was bare, and English painters, ill-trained for anything but portraits, were unlikely to fill it.
When at last the National Gallery was willed into existence, in 1824 with a government grant of £60,000 to acquire the pictures belonging to the deceased banker Julius Angerstein, together with the Pall Mall mansion they adorned, it was the result of a typically British fudge. The process, lasting over 100 years, mingled radical politics (John Wilkes was a prime mover in the cause of enabling the common man’s ‘rapturous enjoyment’ of art) with Tory connoisseurship, led by the not entirely altruistic Sir George Beaumont, a painter manqué given to ‘discovering’ figures such as Constable and Turner, only to drop them when their veneration of Old Masters failed to match his own in slavishness.
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