London National Gallery

London National Gallery is one of the largest and most visited art galleries in the world. Its public collection contains more than 2 thousand paintings by artists from Western Europe covering the period of 13-20 centuries.

It is considered that gallery was founded in 1824 when the parliament allocated money to purchase a collection of 38 paintings from the heirs of the banker Angerstein. Until 1839 the collection was housed in a building on Pall Mall Street. However, it grew so quickly that in 1831 it was decided to build a large gallery building on the site of the King`s Mews in Charing Cross on the northern side of Trafalgar Square.

On April 9, 1839, the new building of the National Gallery received its first visitors. All paintings were arranged in chronological order. In 1991 the additional wing of Sainsbery was built where now you can see the earliest works of artists of the 13th – 16th centuries, such as Piero della Francesca, Botticelli, Masaccio, Mantegna, Fra Filippo Lippi and others. 

Paintings of artists of the 16th – 17th centuries are in the northern part of the gallery. These are the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, Holbein the Younger, Titian, Bosch, Parmigianino and others. In the western part of the gallery you can see the paintings of such artists of the 17th century as Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Velasquez, Murillo, Turner and others.And in the eastern part of the gallery you can see the paintings of the artists of the 18th century – the beginning of the 20th century, Reynolds, Constable, Delacroix, Gericault, Renoir, Manet, Rousseau, Ingres and other famous impressionists.