By the time it reopens, the National Gallery will have been shut for some 111 days, the longest closure in the gallery’s history. For the past three months only the most vital members of the gallery’s staff have been able to walk among those hallowed halls – a reduced staff of cleaners and security guards, vital to keep the place running.
For Alastair Sooke, who visited the gallery as it prepares to reopen, the experience it quite removed from what it once was. He notes: “there are surprises, unusual perspectives, including several new acquisitions, by Gainsborough, Sorolla, and the 18th-century Swiss artist Liotard.”
The gallery is accustomed to considerable visitor numbers – on average 16,000 a day, amounting to six million per year, yet the more recent peace and quiet has been anything but for director Gabriele Finaldi, who felt an “almost physical necessity to return”.
In order to ensure the experience is safe for all its visitors, members of the public will be asked to walk on one of three specially designed routes and encouraged to wear face masks.
The gallery is the first to reopen in London, only four days after the government declares it to be safe. Finaldi notes that: “I feel a kind of responsibility that the gallery should be there for the British public at times of stress. And people have had a pretty tough time these last three months.”
He concludes: “The gallery is a place where, over generations, we’ve invested significance and time. So, for people to be able to take possession again of something which is theirs, I think will raise spirits.”
