CODART, Dutch and Flemish art in museums worldwide

With the closure of the Sainsbury Wing, recent visitors to the National Gallery had to contend with a somewhat diminished experience. Because the entrance to the Sainsbury Wing, which first opened its doors to the public in 1991, was no longer considered to be fit for purpose in an age of increased visitor numbers and intensified security concerns, plans were drawn up to reshape the ground floor entrance and enhance facilities for the Gallery’s visitors, introducing inviting spaces that reflect the caliber of a leading global institution and the evolving needs of those who walk through the Gallery’s doors. Another concern was that the Gallery has a thriving membership scheme but nowhere for members to congregate and connect. That too needed to be addressed, and a new Supporters’ House was created behind the south-west façade of the original building, often referred to as the Wilkins building. In addition, the Gallery’s Learning Centre at the back of the 1970s North Galleries extension on Orange Street was also comprehensively modernized. The Roden Centre for Creative Learning can now deliver a more ambitious program for both young and adult learners.

This major operation was carried out while the Gallery remained open to the public, all the while also celebrating its bicentenary in 2024. Sacrifices inevitably had to be made, not least removing all the early Renaissance and Early Netherlandish paintings from the Sainsbury Wing. Many went to store, but the most important works were temporarily rehoused in the main-floor galleries of the Wilkins building. Consequently, some works normally on display there had to make way for displaced ones, while others occasionally found themselves rubbing shoulders with less obviously natural bedfellows. A complicating factor was that major building works have a habit of causing potentially damaging vibrations, which occasionally led to additional rooms being closed in the Wilkins building. The upside of such a major undertaking, however, is that it brought an opportunity to rethink how the permanent collection of the National Gallery should be displayed across the Gallery’s main floors once the Sainsbury Wing reopened in May 2025.

Some clear principles were established. Perhaps most important among these was that a collection which spans the history of Western painting from Giotto to Cézanne and which, moreover, has the luxury of being able to show major masterpieces for every school of painting within that span, warrants a largely chronological hang by school, even if they are occasionally mixed with works from other schools if this contributes to visitors’ understanding of the story that the Gallery can tell. The Gallery’s collection is comprehensive without being exhaustive. It contains just over 2,500 paintings, which is a relatively small number compared to most museums. Of these, a selection of just over 1,000 works is on permanent display. And yet this small but choice offering allows visitors to travel from mountain top to mountain top to survey the whole of Western painting. A chronological view is not only possible but imperative when such riches are available.

For that reason the Sainsbury Wing, which has now become the principal entrance for visitors entering the building (the Portico ‘entrance’ of the Wilkins building will be in use only as an exit), remains the home of early Renaissance and Early Netherlandish pictures, from the Wilton Diptych, Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait and Gossaert’s Adoration of the Magi to Pollaiuolo’s Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (newly restored and reframed), culminating in Raphael’s Mond Crucifixion. It also includes a magnificent new acquisition of a painting whose authorship for now remains unclear but whose importance as an early Netherlandish or French work of truly exceptional quality is beyond doubt (fig.1).

Displaying the northern and southern schools in adjacent rooms in the Sainsbury Wing has the advantage of allowing visitors to compare and contrast, or discover affinities between, paintings made north and south of the Alps. A now darker color scheme in the side aisles of the Sainsbury Wing (fig.2) has introduced a form of intimacy formerly lacking in Venturi and Scott Brown’s grand ‘Tuscan’ spaces, which do lend themselves well, however, to the display of large altarpieces (fig.3). The darker colors especially benefit smaller works and gold-ground paintings. It has also introduced much-needed variation among the many galleries in the Sainsbury Wing, which were previously uniformly light grey and did not help visitors to orientate themselves. It is in the Sainsbury Wing that the greatest transformation has taken place, not just in the refurbished entrance, but also where it matters most, in the permanent display of the collection.

Another important principle was that the displays should not fight against the architecture but work with it and make the most of the opportunities it offers: the scale and style of rooms, sequences, proximities and relationships between spaces and availability of natural light. The Gallery is also fortunate to have many axis views, which can be exploited to hang key works in the collection, such as the already-mentioned Mond Crucifixion, which graces one end of one of the most glorious long vistas anywhere, opposite Stubbs’s Whistlejacket all the way at the other end on the east side of the Wilkins building.

It was also felt that the Gallery should take full advantage of where it has strength and depth in a particular artist. Thus there are rooms largely or even exclusively devoted to Titian, Rubens, Van Dyck, Poussin and Monet. Few museums can boast a collection of paintings by Rembrandt that can fill an entire room and spans his entire career from his early days in Leiden, via his magical Woman Bathing in a Stream, to one of his last self-portraits, painted only months before his death.

The Gallery’s new display can perhaps be described as ‘radically traditional’, bound to such an approach by the riches it holds. But in a few instances a ‘transversal’ or ‘cross-collection’ approach was considered appropriate. There are famous comparisons within the Gallery’s collection that are widely discussed and illustrated in print but are rarely taken advantage of on the Gallery’s own walls. Again, the architecture has been important in creating such cross-collection moments. An example is the octagonal room that marks the transition from the Italian Renaissance rooms in the Wilkins building to the northern Baroque rooms in the 1970s extension to the north; where once Titian’s Man with a Quilted Sleeve (now identified as a portrait of Gerolamo Barbarigo) and Rembrandt’s Self Portrait at the Age of 34 lived separate lives, they are now paired to show the influence of the former on the latter. Likewise, Rubens’s Portrait of Susanna Lunden(?), better known as ‘Le Chapeau de Paille’, not only looks resplendent after recent conservation treatment but is now confronted with Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s Self Portrait in a Straw Hat (fig.4). In a similar way, the Wilkins building’s Central Hall –a grand reception space behind what used to be the Portico entrance – was considered an appropriate space for a gathering of full-lengths portraits, with works ranging from the grandeur of the recently acquired Portrait of a Gentleman of the Soranzo Family by Veronese to the swagger of Sargent’s portrait of Lord Ribblesdale. Another cross-collection display was created for the genre of still lifes, whose essential formula, first determined around 1600, proved so successful that it remained a central concern for artists for many centuries. Here Willem Kalf’s magisterial Still Life with Drinking-Horn and Francisco de Zurbarán’s exquisite A Cup of Water and a Rose nod to still lifes ranging from Adriaen Coorte to Melendez and Monet (fig.5).

The labels for individual works have all been looked at afresh, and each room now has a wall panel introducing visitors to its contents. In the North Galleries, where Dutch and Flemish paintings are shown, this ranges from monographic rooms devoted to Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Dyck to thematic displays devoted to history paintings and landscapes. One thematic display in this part of the building is entirely devoted to how many of the genres for which seventeenth-century Dutch painting is best known were first introduced in the city of Haarlem. It is here that one of the stars of the recent Frans Hals exhibition in London, Amsterdam and Berlin, a collaborative work by Frans Hals and Claes van Heussen, is now on display as a long-term loan from its private owner (fig.6). This space also includes one of the Gallery’s bicentenary acquisitions, a rare and large banquet still life by the pioneering Haarlem still-life painter Floris van Dijck (fig.7).

The National Gallery’s new display will remain on view largely undisturbed for about a year. This was possible only by putting a temporary stop on outgoing loans, but at least visitors to Trafalgar Square will be relieved to know that during the next twelve months they will be able to view the Gallery’s unparalleled collection in all its glory.

Bart Cornelis is Curator of Dutch and Flemish Paintings 1600-1800 at the National Gallery in London. He has been a member of CODART since 2017 and a member of the editorial board of CODARTfeatures since 2020.