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“The National Gallery is doing a great job isn’t it?” David Hockney reflected in 2024. “Everything in the collection is good, every single picture is good.” Judging by recent performance, the artist would seem to be right. The gallery’s blockbuster Van Gogh exhibition closed in January last year after a record-breaking 335,000 visitors. Its 200th anniversary celebrations, including the opening of the newly designed Sainsbury Wing and rehang, attracted a 60% rise in visitors since May.
But barely 10 months later, the art world is digesting the stark news that the National Gallery will face a deficit of £8.2m in the coming year. Proposed cuts could include fewer free exhibitions, higher ticket prices, less international borrowing and job losses. Two huge cash donations of £150m each are ringfenced to build an ambitious new wing for contemporary art, not for daily running costs.
The National’s predicament is a grim reflection of the perilous state of the country’s cultural sector as a whole. Last year the Tate lost 7% of its workforce, and staff took strike action over “endemic low pay”; jobs have been also lost at London’s opulent Royal Academy.
Public funding cuts, inflation and dilemmas of corporate sponsorship have left many institutions struggling. The National Gallery has been slow to recover from the pandemic, with visitor numbers down from 6 million a year to 3.8 million in the 12 months to September 2025.
One of the gallery’s founding principles, when it opened on 10 May 1824, was that it must be “free to anyone who applied at the door”. What began with 38 paintings, bought by the government after the death of a financier collector, is now a collection of 2,300. In the 1850s, its first director, Charles Eastlake, was given a £10,000 purchase grant to take on his travels on the continent each summer. Today the gallery receives an annual government grant of £32m, roughly half of its costs. The rest is made up from exhibition fees, commercial sales (the shop and cafe), and philanthropic and corporate sponsorship.
The UK’s highly successful policy of free admission to its national museums and galleries celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. But the funding crisis has reignited debate over its future. Amid calls for increased spending in areas such as defence and special educational needs, access to old masters might seem a low priority. But culture is not a luxury. It is vital to the country’s wellbeing, tourism and international standing.
In which other capital city can anyone wander in and find masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci, Titian and Rembrandt for nothing? The National Gallery is part of the nation’s story. It houses some of the most important and beautiful paintings in Europe. And, crucially, they belong to us.
In his 1995 lecture “My National Gallery”, Alan Bennett described the sense of recognition – what he called “the evidence of humanity” – that looking at a painting, like reading a novel, can give us: “it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours”. In our era of artificial intelligence, division and disinformation, that hand must be able to reach out to as many people as possible. For too long, the UK’s cultural institutions, national and regional, have been pleading for greater assistance. Now one of the oldest and most prestigious is sounding the alarm. The government must listen.
