National Portrait Gallery history
The Royal Mail’s latest edition of commemorative stamps focus on ten of ‘the great and the good’ out of the more than 9000 faces that hang on the walls of London’s National Portrait Gallery. Launched to mark the 150th anniversary of the gallery, the series features portraits of ten important figures from different areas of UK life, and in different forms, embracing the mediums of sculpture, watercolour, oil painting and photography. The only rule was that images could not be of people still alive.
But if things had been different, the pictures - of Dame Cicely Saunders, Emmeline Pankhurst, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mary Seacole, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Walter Scott and William Shakespeare - could today be hanging in Bethnal Green, not Trafalgar Square.
The National Portrait Gallery was founded in 1856, as a celebration of British military, economic and industrial success, and in the wake of Prince Albert’s triumphant Great Exhibition. The idea of national heroes was a powerful one, and Queen Victoria, her consort Albert and Prime Minister Lord Palmerston were lobbied to establish an exemplary gallery of national portraits. The gallery still collects portraits of those who have made a significant contribution to British life. The gallery’s first home was at 29 Great George Street, Westminster. But it was just the first stop In a 40-year search for larger premises, for safe conservation and effective display space.
Meanwhile, Albert had put forward the idea of a new building on the Brompton Park Estate to house elements of the Great Exhibition, which had been a huge success a few years before, and ideally using the new iron-framed technology that had made the Crystal Palace itself possible. Four days after making his proposals public, the firm of Charles Young and Co came forward with a design. Things moved quickly, helped by the radical design of the building. Work began in early 1856 and the new museum opened in July 1857. In 1864, the structure was dismantled to make way for a more permanent building on the Brompton site; this in turn would become the Victoria and Albert Museum, which stands in Exhibition Row alongside the Science and Natural History Museums.
The original frame, still visible inside, was bought to Bethnal Green in the 1860s, re-erected, and finished with its distinctive red brick to the designs of JW Wild. The outside was decorated with murals depicting the arts, sciences and agriculture by FW Moody. And the marble mosaic floor, so painstakingly repaired in phase 1 of the 21st century refurbishment, was assembled by women prisoners from Woking Jail. In June 1872, The Museum was opened by the Prince and Princess of Wales (the future King Edward VII and Princess Alexandra). Among the early displays were the Animal and Food products collection from the Great Exhibition, and 1,600 works of art belonging to Sir Richard Wallace – the future Wallace Collection.
And in 1885, it became home to the NPG after a fire at the Royal Horticultural Society’s buildings in Westminster, where the NPG collection was housed. But Bethnal Green proved an unpopular location for the gallery, as it was inconvenient for visitors from central London. It was claimed that the museum was an unsafe environment for works of art. The iron roof with its glass skylights gave little protection against heat and cold, it suffered from condensation and it was not waterproof. In the winter of 1888-9 melted snow got in and dripped on to five portraits. The NPG Trustees asked for a report on the condition of the collection. Many of the pictures were found to be in a deplorable condition and the search began for a new site. In 1896, the Bethnal Green Museum lost its collection, when the current site near Trafalgar Square opened.
But the museum in search of a collection went on. From the 1920s, Bethnal Green started to focus on children. Keeper Arthur Sabin encouraged local schools to visit, established a classroom, and gave child-friendly lectures. One of the galleries was dedicated to childhood, material was actively collected, and objects were transferred from the V&A. Then in 1974, V&A Director Roy Strong redefined Bethnal Green as a Museum of Childhood, and towards the end of the twentieth century, it became the National Museum of Childhood.