The British Paintings
National Gallery Catalogues

The National Gallery’s collection of British paintings contains some of the most famous and best-loved pictures in the country: Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-Mode series, Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, The Hay Wain and The Cornfield by Constable and Rain, Steam and Speed and The Fighting Temeraire by Turner. Most of these have been on public view for over a hundred years and have become national icons.

In 1824 the National Gallery’s founding collection of thirty-eight works included nine British paintings. By 1897 there were over 500 British works. In that year the Tate Gallery was established as the National Gallery of British Art, whose role was to build and display a representative British collection, and accordingly the majority of works by British artists held in Trafalgar Square have in the intervening years been transferred to Millbank. The National Gallery still makes acquisitions of exceptional interest, the most recent being the tiny but powerful Wall in Naples by Thomas Jones and the life-size portrait of the horse Whistlejacket by George Stubbs.

This catalogue discusses the sixty British pictures in the Gallery in two parts: Constable, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Reynolds, Stubbs and Turner star in Part I, with paintings which are either major works or (like Gainsborough’s amiable John Plampin) have remained ‘at home’ in Trafalgar Square because of their enduring popularity. Part II consists of portraits (including three sculpted busts) of collectors or public servants who helped over the years to create the National Gallery as we know it today. While few of these are great works of art, the National Gallery is proud to retain portraits which reflect the characters and careers of the oddly assorted men who shaped its history. The biographies contain lively accounts of men as different from each other as the absentee clergyman and passionate collector, Reverend William Holwell Carr, and the fiery Layard of Nineveh.

These catalogue entries are the result of a pilot project to set up a process that takes the desktop publishing files that were sent to press, converts them to a more flexible digital format, and transforms them into web pages and other formats. This is a complicated process, as we are dealing with large and complex texts: these five trial entries alone come to 111,250 words.

We have tried to stay as close to the original texts and arrangements as possible, whilst also creating online entries that are self-contained: everything you need to understand the entry should be in that page, so sections like bibliographies, lists of abbreviations, glossaries, appendices and the explanation of how the catalogue works have been brought into the entry webpage from elsewhere in the catalogue. Because of the conventions followed in the original texts regarding references, we have had to assemble bibliographies from various sources: this is why entries may be formatted differently, or be briefer or more discursive than you might expect. We are investigating how we might improve this in the future.

Editorially, we have corrected obvious typos. We have also acquired new versions of the various images, which means that the credit lines have had to be updated to match the image suppliers' current requirements. Current collection images are temporary derivatives, which we hope to replace with a more refined system allowing access to higher-resolution or zoomable version in due course. Images, which often fell in the middle of running text in order to sit well on the page, have been moved to the next paragraph break after their original position - with the exception of the main image of the painting in catalogue, which has been moved to the head of the entry. (This explains why the page numbering may indicate empty pages.) Otherwise, we have not updated the texts to reflect current opinion: they reflect the state of knowledge at the time they were written. However, we are investigating ways in which curators can add a supplementary update.

Following assessment of this pilot, we hope to continue work on more entries, and to further develop our online publishing pipeline. In the meantime we hope you find them useful, and would welcome any feedback you might have.