The National Gallery is celebrating one million people in the UK visiting a National Gallery touring exhibition over the last decade. This comes as its flagship touring series the The National Gallery Masterpiece Tour turns 10 years old and the Gallery announces its open call for partners for its 2025–27 iteration.
1,004,763 visitors have now attended National Gallery exhibitions across the UK since the launch a decade ago of the ‘Masterpiece Tour’ series, in which the National Gallery and non-London museums, galleries and art centres collaborate to display major works from the collection. The Gallery has been expanding its touring programme as part of its commitment to bringing people and paintings together across the UK, with projects such as the NG200 National Treasures exhibitions, the ‘Visits’ series and touring exhibitions such as ‘Dutch Flowers’ and ‘Castles: Paintings from the National Gallery, London’.
This edition of ‘The National Gallery Masterpiece Tour’ builds on a year of NG200 celebrations which seek to reaffirm the National Gallery as the nation’s gallery, with projects around the UK and Northern Ireland such as ‘National Treasures’, which placed 12 of the National Gallery’s masterpieces with 12 partner organisations, who were overall within an hour’s journey of 35 million people – more than half the UK population. This programme has achieved great success; National Museums Northern Ireland celebrated its 50,000th visitor to the exhibition this month.
The work selected for the first year of this ‘Masterpiece Tour’ is Monet’s The Petit Bras of the Siene at Argenteuil (1872), a work which has left the Gallery only once in the last 20 years. Monet depicts a tranquil scene of a cool day on the outskirts of the small suburban town of Argenteuil. Although the town was already partly industrialised and a popular location for sailing and leisure boating in the summer, Monet only hints at this developing bustle with a few scattered buildings behind a screen of the trees. Instead, he focuses on a sparse and intimate moment by the river. The orderly composition, variety of brushstrokes and reflection in the water are all regular features of Monet’s work. Partners will be able to develop their own displays to explore and draw out themes in this work which are most relevant to them and their communities.
As part of this edition of the ‘Masterpiece Tour’, partners will also each connect with a local community organisation to support the exhibition or public programme related to the ‘Masterpiece Tour’ painting each year. To support this, in addition to the standard funding to support the display of the painting, the National Gallery will provide a second contribution to support engaging and working with this community partner.
National Gallery Director Dr Gabriele Finaldi said: ‘The National Gallery’s collection belongs to all of us. It is part of our duty and our honour to look after these paintings and to bring them to where people are, not just expect them to come to us. That one million people have visited these exhibitions in the last decade proves the desire to engage with our collection is growing, and we look forward to welcoming the next million visitors across the UK.’
Head of National Touring Exhibitions, Alexandra Kavanagh said: ‘Touring exhibitions are very important to the Gallery, and one million visitors seeing a National Gallery painting around the UK is as exciting for us as it is for all the partners we’ve worked with over the last decade. Partnering on touring exhibitions does so much more than bring beloved paintings from the collection to other places in the UK – it supports the whole country’s cultural ecosystem, connects people with paintings that belong to us all, and allows us to learn and expand our own practices and interpretations through the creativity of our partner organisations and their communities.’
Chair of Trustees of York Museums Trust, James Grierson said: ‘Working as a UK partner of the National Gallery has had a dramatic impact here in York. For our ‘National Treasures’ exhibition, we are selling record numbers of tickets, have attracted new donors and sponsors and reached new audiences. Partnerships like this can achieve a significant cultural multiplier effect by boosting the sustainability and reach of museums and galleries like ours. We warmly congratulate the Gallery and all those partners on achieving such a significant visitor milestone’.
