An Opening

 It was on this day in 1824 that the National Gallery opened to the public – not in its present building, but in a quite inadequate town house at 100 Pall Mall. Already by this stage 'the nation' (i.e. the government) had failed to buy a succession of major collections as they became available, but one it did acquire was that of the banker John Julius Angerstein, and it was his Pall Mall house that duly became the first National Gallery. 
  More purchasing opportunities were to be missed over the coming decades, but things changed when Sir Charles Eastlake was appointed its director. He was a man whose taste ran to the Northern and Early Italian 'primitives', and one of the beneficiaries of his purchases in that line was Edward Burne-Jones. As a young man, he studied Van Eyck's Arnolfini Marriage obsessively (he told his wife in the year of his death that 'his whole life long he had hoped to do something as rich and deep in colour as the Arnolfini, and now it was too late'), also Botticelli's Virgin and Child, the golden Filippo Lippi Annunciation, Fra Angelico's Christ Glorified in the Courts of Heaven and the mysterious Piero de Cosimo now known as A Satyr Mourning over a Nymph [below]. 'In front of these pictures,' writes Penelope Fitzgerald in her excellent biography, 'the shade of the young Burne-Jones, in his soft hat, must still hover.' A pleasing thought for my next visit to the dear old National Gallery, whenever that might be – soon, I hope...