Image © The National Gallery, London
London, United Kingdom 2025
In 2024, London’s world-famous National Gallery celebrated a milestone: its 200th anniversary. A major part of this celebration is an £85m phased capital project that remodels and refreshes the Sainsbury Wing, which first opened in 1991.
- Architecture by Selldorf Architects.
In May of 2025, marking the end of the museum’s 200th birthday year, the museum celebrated the reopening of The Sainsbury Wing and the major redisplay of their collection, C C Land: The Wonder of Art.
The new development, three years in the making, has been designed to welcome visitors with new, improved facilities, and connectivity between the Sainsbury Wing and the Wilkins Building. It also presented an opportunity to rethink the display of the Gallery’s collection of paintings.
Goppion was delighted to be invited to work with the National Gallery as part of their NG200 program. We created 11 freestanding and table showcases, installed across 11 rooms in both the Sainsbury Wing and Wilkins Building.
All projects have challenges of one sort or another, but this presented one of the nicest kind. We sought a design solution that would guarantee additional stability for the paintings to be displayed, and so participated in an experimental scientific project with Professor Francesco Graziotti’s structural engineering team at Pavia University, Italy. From this research we developed a showcase system designed to mitigate vibrations using a table built within each plinth under the display deck. Each was built according to the weight of the artwork and the specific environmental considerations of the galleries.
An additional factor influencing our thinking was Chris Oberon’s 3D exhibition design at the National Gallery: our showcases had to protect and conserve, but also look and feel like an integral part of the design vision for each room.
We created a mock-up to test at Pavia University, then studied the showcase behavior in-situ and adjusted specifications accordingly. At the end of March 2025, National Gallery team representatives came to our warehouse to inspect the showcases before the shipment to London for installation.
The Wilton Diptych, The National Gallery, London
Among the precious paintings now protected Goppion’s new showcases are works by celebrated artists such as Marmion, Duccio, Dürer, Seurat and Rousseau, among others. Of special note is the Wilton Diptych, one of very few panel paintings that have survived from the Middle Ages, most likely by an English or French artist. This striking work was created as an altar piece for the private devotional use of Richard II, King of England. Richard reigned from 1377 to 1399 – a period punctuated by significant unrest and conflict. The Wilton Diptych is a symbolic statement of the divine right of monarchs; something King Richard was keen on exploiting. Inevitably, this led to tyrannical behavior, forced abdication, and Richard’s eventual death in prison. Down the centuries that followed, the Diptych passed through the hands of successive kings and nobles, and quite remarkably managed to survive the widespread destruction of religious imagery in England during the Commonwealth years.
Other celebrated paintings included in the Goppion-made displays are several by Hans Memling. His Donne Triptych, made around 1478, is a religious family portrait, commissioned by influential Welsh diplomat and soldier, Sir John Donne. Memling certainly didn’t conform to the archetype of the starving artist; he prospered as a painter and on his death in 1494 left a considerable fortune in property.
Back in the 21st century, the National Gallery’s bicentenary will be marked by further capital projects following the opening phase in 2025, all aimed to better welcome old and new visitors to the Gallery and to support and expand how the Gallery shares its research and communication of art history, conservation, and heritage science.
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