How national is the National Gallery in London?

Kirsten Tambling, How national is the National Gallery in London?, Apollo, 10 May 2024

From the May 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

The Raising of Lazarus (c. 1517–19), Sebastiano del Piombo, incorporating designs by Michelangelo. National Gallery, London.

The Sebastiano del Piombo is mine!!!’ crowed the novelist and art collector William Beckford in May 1823. Originally commissioned by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici and standing at nearly four metres high, Sebastiano’s The Raising of Lazarus (1517–19) was one of 19th-century London’s most celebrated pictures; a coup even for Beckford, the voracious proprietor of Fonthill Abbey. In the painting, a crowd gesticulates in amazement as Lazarus unfurls himself from his winding sheet, at the command of a classically dressed Christ. Michelangelo is thought to have helped Sebastiano with the figures, knowing that the painting was intended to vie with the Transfiguration (1516–20) of his young rival, Raphael, in Narbonne Cathedral.

Since 1798, The Raising of Lazarus had hung in the London drawing room of the businessman John Julius Angerstein, who died in January 1823. Beckford made his trustees a liberal offer, but his jubilation was premature. In April 1824, The Raising of Lazarus was purchased, along with 37 other paintings from Angerstein’s collection – as well as his town house at 100 Pall Mall, where they were displayed – by Lord Liverpool’s government, for ‘the foundation for a National Gallery of works of art’.

Sebastiano’s celebrity has dwindled since 1824 and Angerstein’s name may not hover on the lips of many 21st-century visitors, but The Raising of Lazarusstill bears the honorific inventory number ‘NG1’ in the modern National Gallery, which celebrates its bicentenary this year. The gallery moved out of Angerstein’s house and into William Wilkins’s purpose-made building in 1838, but Angerstein and his collection continue to inflect the shape and character of its holdings. Excepting Russia, Britain was the last major European nation to establish a gallery – ‘to give,’ (as Liverpool declared in the House of Commons) ‘a munificent encouragement to the support and promotion of the Fine Arts’.

Britain was also unusual in purchasing its collection readymade, rather than turning a princely gallery or royal collection over to the state (as had happened in France and across much of 18th-century Germany). The Angerstein collection, whose contents were enticingly outlined for prospective buyers in an illustrated presentation catalogue authored by John Young, Keeper of the British Institution, was small, and its origins less than august. However, it was also a product of the specific collecting conditions of the late 18th century and a remarkably focused example of the period’s accepted art historical canon. As such, its acquisition was a statement of intent about the purpose of the new project.

‘This is not a bazaar, a raree-show of art, a Noah’s ark of all the Schools, marching out in endless procession,’ William Hazlitt wrote, ‘but a sanctuary, a holy of holies, collected by taste, sacred to fame.’ Young was pithier: Angerstein’s collection included ‘only the finest works of the greatest masters, to the entire exclusion of every inferior production’. Almost half the total works acquired by the nation were Italian; 25 were dateable to within the period 1600–50. In addition to Sebastiano, there were paintings by Titian, Raphael, Correggio, the Carraccis and Domenichino. Angerstein had also owned three Van Dycks, three Rembrandts (two since downgraded to a pupil) and five Claudes (‘Mon dieu! Such Claudes!’ exclaimed Charles Lamb).

The National Gallery’s holdings have since expanded in scope, with acquisitions such as the Robert Peel collection, which brought 68 Dutch and Flemish works into the collection in 1871. Even so, at just over 2,300 paintings, it retains the comparatively small size and tight focus it inherited from Angerstein, and Young’s voice echoes in its current self-identification as a collection showing ‘the story of European art, masterpiece by masterpiece’.

Part of the gallery’s original collection can be seen in Frederick Mackenzie’s watercolour view of The National Gallery, when at Mr. J.J. Angerstein’s House, Pall Mall (exhibited 1834), which gives an elegant gloss on what a contemporary described as a ‘small dingy house on the south side of Pall Mall’. It is busy – the new gallery received 24,000 visitors in its first seven months – and, as early advocates for a National Gallery had hoped, artists are busy copying the masters. Sebastiano dominates the main wall, but he still vies with Raphael, whose Pope Julius II (1511) is in the back room. Also prominent are three of Angerstein’s Claudes – Seaport with the Embarkation of Saint Ursula (1641), Landscape with Cephalus and Procris Reunited by Diana (1645) and A Seaport(1644) – and Aelbert Cuyp’s Hilly Landscape with Figures (1655–60).

The National Gallery, when at Mr. J.J. Angerstein’s House, Pall Mall (1824–34), Frederick Mackenzie. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Mackenzie’s watercolour also shows several of the paintings the nation had acquired in the intervening decade, most of which continued the original focus on continental Old Masters: Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–23, bought in 1826 from the goldsmith Thomas Hamlet); Correggio’s Ecce Homo(1525–30), purchased from the Marquess of Londonderry in 1834, and Tintoretto’s Saint George and the Dragon (c. 1555), one of 32 paintings bequeathed in 1831 by the clergyman art collector William Holwell Carr, on the proviso they be hung with Angerstein’s. Carr’s was not the only donation made with explicit reference to the original collection: in 1822, Sir George Beaumont, the British Institution’s founding director, made the gift of his own pictures, including three further Claudes, dependent on the nation’s acquisition of the collection at Pall Mall.

A certain mystique had always hung about Angerstein. Born in St Petersburg in 1735, he had come to London in his teens and was popularly (and impossibly) rumoured to be the natural son of Catherine the Great (b. 1729). From working in the counting house of Andrew Poulett Thomson (a more probable parent), he established himself as broker and underwriter at Lloyd’s of London, newly expanded from its beginnings in a coffee house in Tower Street to a professionalised outfit synonymous with marine insurance.

The standardisation and formalisation of financial coverage for ships – most importantly through the ‘Register of Ships’ which Lloyd’s established in the 1760s – were key factors in the enormous expansion of British overseas trade, including the slave trade, during this period. Angerstein’s business activities therefore put him at the forefront of national and international affairs. He was a government shipbroker during the American War of Independence, became chairman of Lloyd’s in 1790 and supplied ships and insurance to the British government throughout the Napoleonic Wars.

His fabulous wealth contrasted with Angerstein’s personally unassuming habits: Joseph Farington, who described his clothes as ‘plain, but respectable’, remembered him dozing on and off after dinner, beneath his enormous Sebastiano. ‘After he awoke,’ he recalled, ‘he ate an orange with sugar.’ Nonetheless, he spent liberally on art. He was reported to have paid 3,500 guineas for the Sebastiano, 8,000 for two Claudes and (it was rumoured) 4,000 pounds for Rembrandt’s The Woman Taken in Adultery (1644). He also made full use of his collection’s social and philanthropic potential, lending to public exhibitions at the British Institution and making his Pall Mall home available to artists and a limited public, possibly from as early as 1800.

Angerstein’s relationship with the art establishment went both ways. Although the anonymous author of an obituary in the Annual Biography and Obituary for 1824 was keen to stress that he had copious ‘natural taste’, he was generally agreed to have lacked ‘those opportunities of observation and comparison which alone could have secured him from occasional imposition’. His collection was therefore formed partly under advice, notably that of Thomas Lawrence, a personal friend who also happened to be president of the Royal Academy, and whose involvement therefore added establishment grandeur to the nation’s acquisition.

Angerstein can be seen at the age of 30, in 17th-century dress, as painted by Lawrence’s predecessor, Joshua Reynolds. ‘Van Dyck’ costume was a fashionable reference point for mid 18th-century aesthetes and aristocrats, but Angerstein’s black and white clothing and easy confidence are more specifically reminiscent of Van Dyck’s portrait of George Gage (one of the most significant art brokers for Charles I), which Angerstein would purchase from the sale of Reynolds’s own collection in 1795. Van Dyck’s gentleman-buyer (believed in the 18th century to be Rubens) lolls over a classical pedestal with a studied nonchalance that belies his intense concentration on the antiquity offered up to him.

John Julius Angerstein (1765), Joshua Reynolds. Saint Louis Art Museum.

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