National Gallery

The National Gallery was founded in 1824 when the British government paid £57,000 to purchase 38 paintings from the estate of banker John Julius Angerstein, a collection that included works by Raphael, Claude and Rubens. Unlike the Louvre or Uffizi, the gallery was not built around a nationalized royal or princely collection; it was assembled almost from scratch by Parliament and grew primarily through purchases, bequests and donations, which today account for roughly two-thirds of its holdings. The paintings were initially displayed at Angerstein's former townhouse at 100 Pall Mall before the museum moved in 1838 into a purpose-built neoclassical building designed by William Wilkins on the north side of the newly created Trafalgar Square, a site chosen for being equally accessible to both the wealthy West End and the poorer East End of London. The building has been enlarged repeatedly, most notably with the postmodern Sainsbury Wing (1991) by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, which houses the early Renaissance collection, and a major new extension known as Project Domani is planned to open in the early 2030s. Despite housing a comparatively compact collection of just over 2,300 paintings, the National Gallery is prized for its encyclopedic and unusually high-quality survey of Western European painting from the mid-13th century to 1900, and it remains one of the most visited art museums in the world, free to enter for its permanent collection.