National Gallery, London

National Gallery, London, one of the principal art galleries in Britain and among the most important in the world, located in Trafalgar Square, London, where it opened in 1838. The gallery, in Greek Revival style, was designed by William Wilkins and built in 1833-1887. It was considerably enlarged by the addition of the Sainsbury Wing, financed by members of the Sainsbury family (founders of the British supermarket chain) and designed by Robert Venturi, which opened in 1991. In 2003 the gallery began work on its East Wing development. The first stage of this was completed in September 2004, with the opening of two new entrances to the museum, from Trafalgar Square and St Martin’s Place, and the creation of new public rooms. The second stage of the development was completed in September 2005, with work including renovations to the staircase and the existing entrance hall.

The idea of establishing a national gallery grew out of concern for protecting Britain's artistic heritage caused by the sale of Sir Robert Walpole's collection to Catherine of Russia. The national collection grew from paintings presented to the nation, in 1823, by the collector and connoisseur Sir George Beaumont and a government purchase, in 1824, of 38 works from the collection of the merchant John Julius Angerstein, in whose house in Pall Mall they were initially displayed.

The National Gallery now has over 2,000 works representing the principal schools of European painting from the 13th century to the 20th century. Its collection of Italian Renaissance paintings, displayed in the Sainsbury Wing, represents almost all the great Florentine and Venetian painters of that period and is the most comprehensive outside Italy. Dutch and Flemish painters are also strongly represented, as are French and Spanish painters of the 15th to the 19th centuries.

Notable works include Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife, by Jan van Eyck; Venus and Mars, by Botticelli; the Leonardo Cartoon (a preparatory drawing that Leonardo da Vinci executed for The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John); A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal, by Jan Vermeer; The Woman Taken in Adultery, by Rembrandt; The Judgment of Paris, by Rubens; Portrait of a Man, by Titian; The Emtombment, by Michelangelo; The Rokeby Venus, by Velázquez; and Les Parapluies, by Renoir.