The National Gallery first threw open its doors 200 years ago today. It wasn't in Trafalgar Square at the time, that hadn't been built yet, but at 100 Pall Mall in a dead banker's townhouse. Here John Julius Angerstein's small collection of Old Masters was displayed, slowly growing in scale and stature as the government acquired additional bequests before the enlarged collection moved to its current home in 1838. The bicentenary is being celebrated tonight with a public lightshow across the frontage of the building and a private shindig inside hosted by Jools Holland.
I visited marginally prematurely for a good look round and an admiring wander. "I should try and walk round every room," I thought, and then I thought "I wonder how many rooms there are." This led to a more intriguing 200th birthday challenge, namely could I visit 200 rooms displaying art by branching out across London's other galleries? They all had to be free to access and ideally I wanted to go round 200 rooms in one day. How many galleries would it take? Was it even possible? Place your bets.
It's always a joy to explore the National Gallery, and feels even more special at present wih the Sainsbury Wing closed meaning you enter through the proper front doors for a change. On its walls are hung dozens of world-renowned classic canvases, and if you follow the right route they tell the story of fine art from pre-Renaissance to post-Impressionism. Helpfully for my purposes all the upstairs rooms are numbered (and the downstairs rooms lettered) so keeping a tally wasn't too onerous. I aimed initially for my favourite room where Bathers at Asnières, Sunflowers and A Wheatfield With Cypresses are on display, which is room 43, and then continued round in a sweeping sequence.
Bicentenary fact: The first painting in the National Gallery collection, which still has the catalogue reference NG1, is The Raising of Lazarus by Sebastiano del Piombo and you'll find it in room 32.
The day was young, which was good because the place wasn't yet packed and bad because room 17a only opens at 11am, so I had to I hang on long enough to enjoy Leonardo da Vinci's largest surviving cartoon. I also got to go into Room 46 to see The Last Caravaggio, under almost-as-dim lights, and realised that the number of rooms in the National Gallery is not always a fixed value. The closure of the Sainsbury Wing is a case in point because that would have contributed umpteen more rooms to my total, launching it into the 60s, whereas in fact I only managed to walk round 43 altogether. A decent enough start, but would it be enough to launch me towards 200?
The obvious place to go next was the gallery nextdoor, home to displays of portraiture since 1896 and very recently given a major spruce-up. It's another fabulous warren of art and also of history, indeed if you wander round in chronological order you get to meet all the makers and shakers of their day from Henry VII and Sir Thomas More to Victoria Wood and Judi Dench. Ascending the semi-ridiculous escalator launches you straight into the Tudors, which is room 1, and every room is sequentially numbered after that making cumulative tallying exceptionally easy.
The vast majority of portraits are of straight white men, reflecting the priorities at the time, but an NPG member of staff was attempting to address the imbalance by leading a group round and pointing out the queer history behind James I and the inherent fierceness of some ladies on the floor below. This thankfully is one of the galleries least beset by hordes of schoolchildren, but it was nice to see a primary class from Watford crocodiling round with clipboards and hi-vis before focusing in on one particular canvas. Also full marks to the NPG for being the only gallery on my quest to dish out maps for free (and with a smile), because everyone else either charges £2 or invites you download a sponsored app.
I did the two Tates next, stating with the Pimlico one because that's where the pre-20th century art is. A lot of people skip it because it's not entirely central but it has a fantastic collection covering 500 years of art including a lot of Henry Moores and an entire wing of Turners. Annoyingly the long gallery down the middle is currently sealed off while the next major commission is installed so you can only negotiate the entire building by walking around the edge which gets a bit tortuous in places. But if you're trying to enter every room you want to walk through sequentially anyway so maybe it helped, plus they're also clearly numbered so you soon spot if you've missed one.
I found Ophelia, I donned my special glasses to go into the UV room and I loved the utterly incongruous decimal analogue clock in the Wolfson Gallery. But I also came up against the knotty dilemma of 'what actually is a room anyway', because the map said the numbers only went up to 39 but I think I went into more rooms than that. Specifically the Art Now gallery isn't numbered, room 7 is officially subdivided into 7a and 7b, and is it pedantically correct to include the archive gallery in the basement? Most controversially the Tate's former restaurant is currently hosting a video performance in which artist Rex Whistler (1905-1944) is torn to academic shreds for painting racial caricatures into his epicurean mural, although my dilemma was merely whether to count this as an extra room of art. I didn't in the end.
I was a bit nervous entering Tate Modern because I was still 85 rooms away from my target and that left a mountain to climb. I was even more nervous after wandering round the lower five floors of the new-ish Blatnavik Building because this only added 17 more, one of which was little more than an empty oil tank with two light bulbs in it. But the main building - the original power station - proved a lot more profitable because when they subdivided its floors they created a heck of a lot of separate internal spaces. I tried to count them all, occasionally misdirected by the meandering layout, and wondered whether it was right to count video-serving rooms-within-rooms as 1 or 2.
There's some cracking art in Tate Modern but some inexplicable modern tat too because art is in the eye of the beholder. I was also reassured that I hadn't simply seen all of it before, they do change the rooms around sometimes, so for example Yto Barrada's short film A Guide To Trees For Governors and Gardeners was a thought-provoking Thunderbirdsesque newbie. Suddenly Wham! always gets me too, even after all these years. After some very long walks I eventually reckoned there were 14 rooms on each wing, that's 28 per floor, although consulting the £2 map nudged that down slightly. It's still a whopping total though, a massive 70 rooms of free-to-view art, thankfully putting me within striking distance of hitting my goal.
I was getting tired now so I hoped this classic gallery in Marylebone would deliver me to 200. A visit is always a treat, like being invited into a grand home to admire the antique furniture and chintzy wallpaper as well as the art. The Laughing Cavalier hides amongst them if you know where to look. I started downstairs and soon upped my total to 192, having decided the armoury galleries definitely didn't count. There had better be at least eight rooms upstairs, I thought, and thankfully there were. I didn't need to count the landing or the penultimate cabinet full of miniatures, I hit my target as soon as I walked through from the Study into the Boudoir.
It is quite frankly amazing that you can enjoy 200 rooms of art in London by visiting just five galleries and without paying a penny. Admittedly the Louvre in Paris has over 400 rooms but that's only free on the first Friday evening of the month whereas London's treats are year round. Hurrah for the longstanding service of the National Gallery, now with two centuries under its belt, and which kickstarted all of this cultural bounty exactly 200 years ago. And as if to prove a point, when I stepped into my 201st room at the Wallace Collection who should I discover there but the actual Grayson Perry, fully skirted and ribboned, chatting with staff about his exhibition here next year. Even if you think you've seen it all before, London's artistic offering is always full of surprises.
