Description of the attraction
The National Gallery of British Art is much better known as the Tate Gallery, after its founder, industrialist Sir Henry Tate. It was his private collection that formed the basis of the future museum, representing the fine arts of Great Britain from 1500 to the present day. The gallery was opened to the public in 1897. At the moment, more than 60,000 exhibits are kept here - paintings, drawings, engravings.
During the Second World War, the building of the gallery was damaged by bombing, but almost all the exhibits were evacuated, and those that could not be removed were reliably covered and protected. After the war, the gallery reopened in 1949.
The museum building has been expanded and completed several times. In 1987, the Clore Gallery was opened, where the largest collection of Turner paintings is exhibited. The oldest painting in the museum is Portrait of a Man in a Black Hat (1545) by John Betts. Here visitors can see paintings by Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Constable and many other British and European masters.
Part of the Tate Group of Galleries is the Tate Modern, which presents a collection of European and American paintings created after 1900. It is housed in a former power plant, completely converted into a museum. In the halls of this gallery there are works by Kandinsky, Malevich and Chagall. It is noteworthy that Tate Modern arranges paintings not in chronological order, as is customary in most museums, but groups them according to themes: "Still life, subject, real life", "Landscape and the environment", "Historical painting", "Nude, action, body ".
