Discover All Famend Dutch Art Galleries O

In 1777, the British authorities had the chance to purchase an art collection of worldwide stature, when the descendants of Sir Robert Walpole put his collection up for sale. The MP John Wilkes argued for the government to purchase this “invaluable treasure” and advised that or not it’s housed in “a noble gallery… to be built in the spacious backyard our website of the British Museum”. Nothing got here of Wilkes’s attraction and 20 years later the collection was purchased in its entirety by Catherine the Great; it’s now to be found in the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. Unlike comparable museums in continental Europe, the National Gallery was not formed by nationalising an present royal or princely art collection.

Portrait of the Duke of Wellington by Francisco GoyaIn August 1961 an unemployed bus driver, Kempton Bunton, stole Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, in what stays the one profitable theft from the gallery. Following a high-profile trial, he was found not responsible of stealing the portray, but guilty of stealing the frame. In the National Gallery on 10 March 1914, Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus was damaged by Mary Richardson, a campaigner for women’s suffrage, in protest against the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst yesterday. Later that month another suffragette attacked 5 Bellinis, causing the gallery to shut till the beginning of the First World War, when the Women’s Social and Political Union known as for an end to violent acts drawing consideration to their plight. Pennethorne’s gallery was demolished for the next part of constructing, a scheme by Sir John Taylor extending northwards of the primary entrance.