We are delighted to bring you our special tour of the newly refurbished National Gallery in London, UK.
This podcast has been going for about a year now, offering you a varied range of episodes which we hope many have enjoyed. Niall Crowley created this substack to collate all the episodes, and provide a bit of additional commentary. Do sign up for regular notifications on future episodes.
Still in the spirit of experimenting with what kind of content works well in a podcast format, this episode presents a brief tour of the new hang at National Gallery, with the reopening of the Sainsbury Wing as the gallery’s new main entrance.
Quoting an National Gallery Press release:
The Sainsbury Wing closed in February 2023 to undergo sensitive interventions to its external façade, foyer and first floor, to provide a better and more welcoming first experience to the National Gallery’s millions of visitors, in a plan designed by New York-based Selldorf Architects, working with heritage architects Purcell
The Sainsbury Wing reopened at the beginning of May and the critics’ responses have been broadly very positive, but self-styled ‘Grumpy Art Historian’, Michael Savage pulled me aside when we recently met at a book launch and suggested we should take a perhaps more critical look for ourselves. So Michael Savage and Dido Powell, with a few interjections from me, take us around what they like and don’t like at the revised Gallery.
Michael is an art connoisseur who has a special interest in old masters, and on X calls himself ‘Grumpy Art Historian’; and Dido is an artist and a teacher of art history who runs regular art tours for the Academy of Ideas Arts and Society Forum. Both of them have appeared in previous episodes.
By the way, The National Gallery website has a great interactive map, where you can check each of the rooms we visit and the paintings within them.
This is not an exhaustive tour, not least because I have been determined to keep within our 40 minute limit. Michael and Dido had a lot more to say about the hang and about the Sainsbury Wing, but I think these are the highlights and hopefully we give you a flavour and you will want to see it for yourself sometime.
Apart from anything else — and I should have said this more explicitly in the podcast — the National Gallery has some really beautiful art, and though one might find fault with some aspects of the rehang, and really merits multiple visits of its fabulous collection.
Bt the way, if you are interested in attending Dido Powell’s London art gallery tours, which are due to start again in the autumn, please send an enquiry here, and we will let you know about them in due course. We expect to start the next series in the Autumn.
(Art reproduced courtesy of https://commons.wikimedia.org)
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