The National Gallery’s rehang is a fine achievement — proof that it is a sanctuary of beauty

“Something wonderful is happening”, placards dotted across the National Gallery declare, and this is true. Launching next month, CC Land: The Wonder of Art is the biggest redisplay of Trafalgar Square’s collection since the Sainsbury Wing opened in 1991. Apart from the indignity of the title — does the sponsoring Hong Kong property company’s name really need to precede the art? — it is a resplendent achievement.  

Mostly respectful of chronology and beloved traditions, it nevertheless rethinks the paintings’ contexts and stories. Confirming the National Gallery as a sanctuary of beauty and learning, it subtly acknowledges, however, in myriad small changes, the museum’s inevitable role in today’s culture wars.

The Gallery is riding high on its bicentenary celebrations. Van Gogh broke records for a paying show with 334,589 visitors. Siena: The Rise of Painting is superb. Autumn’s Neo-Impressionism will fascinate, and is heralded by the new dominance accorded Seurat’s statuesque workers at leisure “Bathers at Asnières” in the late 19th-century display, looking all the way down a sequence of galleries to democratising Caravaggio in room 32. And for months the museum has been aquiver, rooms redecorated, paintings decanted in and out. The process was challenging for “sheer logistics”, as well as rethinking, director Gabriele Finaldi tells me on an advance tour of the now nearly complete reorganisation. 

More paintings are on show (more than 1,000), and all look better, thanks to muted wall colours throughout, allowing the canvases’ chromatic richness to shine. The hang plays to the building’s strength, those numerous corridor-like galleries which entice you on, promising revelations, broad vistas, intriguing associations. Stubbs’s “Whistlejacket” and Raphael’s “The Mond Crucifixion” still face each other along the main 184-metre enfilade, but time-travelling spectacles appear en route, notably the central hall’s full-length power portrait contest: Veronese’s emerald-curtained elegance in ermine and satin “Gentleman of the Saranzo Family”, acquired in 2022; Delacroix’s melancholy dandy at dusk “Louis-Auguste Schwiter”; Sargent’s elongated silhouette speaking of end-of-era Edwardian patriarchal authority “Lord Ribblesdale”.    

Sometimes the slightest move redirects attention. Veronese’s “Respect” has been raised to be viewed, as originally intended, as a ceiling picture, and there it is: a drama about consent, a virile youth pulled between Cupid, pointing his arrow at a luscious nude’s genitals, and resisting temptation — the woman is asleep.  

At other times, fresh arrivals shift a room’s whole tenor. The 17th-century Dutch gallery stirs to the Rijksmuseum’s new loans “Feeding the Hungry” and “Refreshing the Thirsty”, humane crowd paintings by Michael Sweerts, a Catholic wanderer who left Amsterdam to join the Jesuits in Goa. Interloper among Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley, Tissot’s assertive businessman “Algernon Moses Marsden”, elbow resting on a flamboyant tiger’s rug, reminds us how diverse the 19th-century avant garde was. Marsden looks unreliable and was — he went bankrupt three times. Delightfully, his great-grandson, fund manager Martyn Arbib, made this recent purchase possible. 

Spurring the entire overhaul was the Sainsbury Wing closure in 2023, for its foyer to be redeveloped. Architect Annabelle Selldorf will vanquish what Finaldi called the “forest” of obtrusive pillars, to provide a better, brighter main entrance, not yet unveiled. It will deliver, Finaldi promises, “a warm welcome” and speed: “from the tube to Titian in a minute and a half.” 

Compared with current queues and security checks, that sounds heartening: straight upstairs to room nine, the splendid Venetian gallery, now opening on a room for the first time dedicated solely to Titian — destination pictures “Bacchus and Ariadne”, “Diana and Actaeon”, “The Death of Actaeon”, pagan myths of seduction, cruelty, fate, brought alive in the richest, fleshiest painting, foundational to art history. 

If the old Sainsbury entrance underwhelmed, the wing itself eventually won gritty respect. Like many visitors once ambivalent about its pastiche church architecture — too bland? too postmodern? — I missed it when it closed, and the first victory of the rehang is a throwback: the graceful, serene display of the Renaissance pictures for which these galleries were designed. Their use over the decades shifted uncertainly; now from the initial instant of Leonardo’s “Virgin of the Rocks”, the Sainsbury Wing is a must-see space. 

Piero della Francesca’s pellucid, calmly geometric “Baptism of Christ” is back in its chapel-like setting. Jacopo di Cione’s “Coronation of the Virgin” with its orchestra of angels returns within a new carved frame, every finial and column painstakingly gilded, uniting its two parts. In an inlaid wood frame with wave decorations, Uccello’s gleaming, restored “The Battle of San Romano” — snow-white chargers, crimson/gold hat, grid pattern of broken lances — looks almost modern; “like de Chirico”, Finaldi says. 

Northern Renaissance pictures large and small, amply though not sparsely hung, have also settled into this faux nave setting. Watching over them is Van Eyck’s quizzical “Portrait of a Man”, another restoration success: overpainted black ground removed, narrow sloping shoulders clearer, contrasts of light and shadow thrown by the extravagant creased turban more vivid.

With a display devoted to the use of gold in medieval and Renaissance art, starring Bermejo’s “Saint Michael Triumphs over the Devil”, the Sainsbury Wing inaugurates the Gallery’s new focuses on materiality and making. The archangel swoops, fearless, impassive, armour and dress all golden — brocade scored with gold leaf imitating looped weave, breastplate magically reflecting Jerusalem’s towers. 

In the main building, sections on oil sketches and pastel — Jean-Étienne Liotard’s decorously precise “The Lavergne Family Breakfast”; Degas’s smudged, frenetic “Ukrainian Dancers” and a new loan, “Ballet Dancers”, orange and turquoise tutus pulsating in stabs of pure colour — similarly draw attention to pictures as tactile, handmade objects, a corrective to museums ruled by social and political criteria. In his excellent new The National Gallery: A History, Jonathan Conlin mourns curatorial studies moving “away from object-centred connoisseurship, privileging theorising and polemic over sustained looking”, draining expertise. “We need to find people who are interested in objects, who know about objects. Where are they to be found?” Finaldi asks.

Some very joyous new displays loftily transcend culture wars, celebrating individual (male) genius — all the Monets, from the realistic choppy seascape “La Pointe de la Hève” to the abstracting “Water-Lilies”, gather for the first time in one room, demonstrating continuity as well as sustained experiment — and personal taste. 

A theatrical gallery partly reprises Charles I’s rare collection, reuniting famous pictures of turbulent post-execution provenance: Tintoretto’s vigorous, intense narrative “Esther before Ahasuerus”, from the Royal Collection; Correggio’s soft, blue-gold-white harmony of figures in a landscape “The School of Love”. Charles’s reign, Finaldi says, “was a key moment when the English court was at its most refined and engaged with Europe — and he lost his head!”

Pivotal to Finaldi’s vision are particular relationships between artists, taking Turner’s demand that his seaports hang alongside Claude’s as “nodal points, steering elements”. Rembrandt’s “Self-portrait at the Age of 34” hangs with its model, Titian’s “Portrait of Gerolamo Barbarigo”; Dutch Caravaggesque follower Gerard van Honthorst is next to the master.  

Rubens both looks back to antiquity and prefigures future confident expressiveness. Brilliantly illuminated (the lighting rail rose two metres), Mantegna’s classical series “The Triumphs of Caesar” (1480s) now hang with Rubens’s homage “A Roman Triumph” (1630) — “he’s Rubensified the elephants, they’re lively and twisting and chubby”, Finaldi grins. Another pairing has Rubens’s engaging secular “Susanna Lunden” (1622-25) alongside the sparkling piece it inspired, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s “Self-portrait in a Straw Hat” (1782) in the octagonal room 15.

This gives prominence to Vigée Le Brun, part of an essential impetus to spotlight the Gallery’s few female artists: “Portrait of a Woman”, meticulously textured, by Catharina van Hemessen, earliest known Flemish woman painter; Rosa Bonheur’s rearing, plunging animals and their muscly handlers “The Horse Fair” atop room 13’s staircase. A low is 2024’s box-ticking acquisition, Eva Gonzalès’s weak “The Full-length Mirror”. A high is Paula Rego’s “Crivelli’s Garden”, a feminist response to Crivelli’s predella for “Madonna of the Swallow”, the saints posed by Gallery staff; it will preside over Locatelli, the Sainsbury mezzanine’s new restaurant. 

“It’s a marathon, they’re all still running” was how the late Frank Auerbach described history’s great painters to me last year. Finaldi’s emphasis on artistic dialogue is amplified in Taschen’s lavishly lovely bicentenary souvenir The National Gallery: Paintings, People, Portraits, where contemporaries highlight favourite works. Auerbach chooses Rembrandt’s “Margaretha de Geer”, “a very old woman, borne on the ruff of her collar like an apple on a plate . . . eloquent of the increasing detachment of old age”. Rachel Whiteread chooses Bellini’s “Doge Leonardo Loredan”, Hockney Piero’s “Baptism”, “a spatial thrill”.

That sense of a baton passed on is a glory of the National Gallery’s comprehensive yet taut collection. Its sensitive, intelligent rehang tells, as Finaldi wanted, “stories across time, how pictures served generations” — and still do.

From May 10, nationalgallery.org.uk

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