Fewer steps, more lifts, and better facilities (including the chic Bar Giorgio, enticingly situated just inside the new entrance) will undoubtedly make it accessible and attractive to many more people. But it’s the rehang of more than 1,000 works of art – up from just under 900, and representing about 40 per cent of the total collection – that is transformational.
Richard Long’s ‘Mud Sun’, specially commissioned, hangs at the top of the Sainsbury Wing stairs (Photo: Zeynep Demir Aslim/ Anadolu /Getty)
But while it remains reassuringly familiar, the collection has been newly and comprehensively considered, in ways that highlight what a remarkable treasure it is – those Piero della Francescas! all those Titians! – and invites visitors to look afresh at favourite paintings.
Grand vistas that unfold through the galleries are a reminder of what a marvellous adventure this is, the long axis between the Sainsbury Wing and the far side of the original building offering a distant, but impressive encounter across time and space between Raphael’s Mond Crucifixion, c.1502-3,and Stubbs’s Whistlejacket, 1762.
In the Sainsbury Wing the rehang emphasises the devotional purpose of much early Western art (Photo: Lucy North/PA)Its imagined east-west axis affords another notable encounter, with Jacopo di Cione’s San Pier Maggiore Altarpiece, c.1370-1, its fragments newly installed in a magnificent frame made by the Gallery’s framing department, facing The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, 1475, by the Pollaiuolo brothers, from about 100 years later. Between the two, Segna di Bonaventura’s 14th-century painted crucifix is positioned authentically high up, evoking a chancel arch.
Walls as dark as thunderclouds in one of the gallery’s themed rooms (Photo: Zeynep Demir Aslim /Anadolu /Getty)
There’s no quick fix for the glaring lack of painter women, but the curators have done their best with what they have, with the prominent display of new acquisitions, such as Eva Gonzalès’s The Full-Length Mirror, about 1869-70. Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s Self Portrait in a Straw Hat, 1782, is hung alongside the Rubens that inspired it, in the esteemed company of Titian and Rembrandt, and in long-distance dialogue with Tiepolo.
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‘Donne Triptych” by Hans Memling (Photo: Lucy North/PA)
Seurat is a logical, if not obvious, climax to a room populated by Cézannes, and Van Gogh’s beloved Sunflowers and Chair are pragmatically placed on opposite sides of the room, though it’s an arrangement that serves to underline the iconic status of each. Other enjoyable conversations are between Constable and Turner, who remains close by the Claudes that he loved and admired so much.
‘C C Land: The Wonder of Art’ at the National Gallery is free to enter and opens on 10 May
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