Giuseppe Gabrielli, 'The National Gallery 1886, Interior of Room 32', 1886

Giuseppe Gabrielli made his painting in 1886. It shows Room 32 of the National Gallery as it looked when it was built with the other Barry Rooms. These created the grand and spacious extension to the original 1838 building in Trafalgar Square. The old building was now too small. The architect Edward Middleton Barry (1830–1880) was commissioned to design a palatial suite of rooms to emulate the great museums of Italy and Germany. The new rooms opened in 1876 to an excited public.

High above the long, elegant room are gilded lunettes and a frieze. Beyond, we can glimpse the spectacular dome, also part of the Barry extension. We see the many characters and levels of society in Victorian London. Some sit in chairs looking relaxed and happy. Others seem not quite so comfortable in the grand surroundings.

The paintings hang mainly at eye level. They are placed closer together than they are today. Gabrielli shows some of the important pictures on the walls as accurate miniatures. On the extreme right, a young woman’s red hat-feather leads our eyes towards a section of Veronese’s Family of Darius before Alexander. Another woman perhaps chaperones her daughter. They partly hide the Botticelli tondo of The Adoration of the Kings, hanging on a free-standing screen. Carefully placed in a gap between two seated viewers, we see Correggio’s School for Love. It sits under the watchful eye of Raphael’s portrait of Pope Julius II.

Above the head of a grey-haired man shines Gerolamo dai Libri’s Virgin and Child with St Anne. The man looks up gravely at a picture we cannot see, while two young women take his arms. This is thought to be Gabrielli himself with his two daughters. We know little about the artist. He may have been the portrait painter ‘G. Gabrielli’ who exhibited at the Royal Academy and at Manchester City Art Gallery in the 1880s.

Although much admired, opulence and grandeur fell out of fashion. Room 32 has since gone through many changes. In 1911 a new clerestory roof was installed. In the 1920s the floor grilles were replaced. In 1991 light-green damask walls appeared, with new lighting tracks and hanging rails for the paintings.

We do not know why Gabrielli painted this picture. But it gives us an invaluable visual record of how the room once looked. In 2019 the decision was made to recreate Barry’s original designs. This painting was a helpful guide in the mammoth task of refurbishment. During the preparatory work, multiple layers of rich colours were revealed. An artist’s name appeared in the centre of each lunette. These are mostly Italian, but Van Eyck, Holbein, Rubens and Rembrandt are among them.

A dark red wall-cloth was installed and the plaster decoration was tip-gilded with gold leaf. The lunettes were recreated on boards, just as they were in Gabrielli’s painting. The lunette marked Titian is original and has been restored. The others have been copied on boards and then mounted over the existing original ones.