TUCKED AWAY like an awkward relative behind its more illustrious neighbour, the National Portrait Gallery was founded by an act of parliament in 1856, having first been proposed by the eccentric Philip Stanhope, the 5th Earl Stanhope. A bust of the earl sits above the entrance alongside the idea’s main supporters, the writer and historian Tomas Macaulay, and a central figure in Victorian culture, Tomas Carlyle. Te collection, such as it was, began life with just a few dozen pictures, moved between Westminster and Exhibition Road (where it found a home in a Royal Horticultural Society building), and later the Bethnal Green Museum before the government finally provided the site in St Martin’s Place. At one time, it had been proposed to house the collection ‘in a couple of rooms’ under the same roof as an enlarged National Gallery.
Te plans for this new and permanent home were begun in 1891, before an Italian Renaissance-style building designed by Ewan Christian and JK Colling was finally opened in 1896. Te building was funded to the tune of £80,000 by a Canadian lawyer and politician,
William Alexander Henry. Appeals to expand the site came as early as 1903. By 1924, the collection had doubled in size since 1896 but the government could not or would not find the money to pay for it.
In 1933, the first major extension was funded by Joseph Duveen who, according to his former partner, Bernard Berenson, ‘stood at the centre of a vast circular nexus of corruption that reached from the lowliest employee of the British Museum, right up to the King’. Duveen’s success was famously attributed
to his observation that ‘Europe has a great deal of art, and America has a great deal of money’, as he bought works of art from the declining aristocracies of Europe and sold them for exorbitantly inflated prices to gullible millionaires in the United States. His fortune, built on the doubtful provenance of many of the works he sold, and in some cases fakes, nevertheless made him enormously wealthy and led to philanthropic donations resulting in the Duveen Galleries at the British Museum to house the Elgin Marbles, the Duveen Galleries at the Tate Gallery on Millbank, and the west wing of the NPG (designed by Richard Allison and JG West).
In the 1980s, the Duveen Wing was gutted to provide a single room for temporary exhibitions. Te top floor galleries were refurbished and at the end of the decade a striking revamp of the original entrance hall and staircase was commissioned from Roderick Gradidge and the decorator Christopher Boulter. In 1988, Stanton Williams was commissioned to create plans for housing the archives and library, new 20th century galleries and a restaurant, as well as
RIGHT: OLIVIER HESS ABOVE: GARETH GARDNER / NISSEN RICHARDS STUDIO
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