The lives of 14 Victorian children who grew up living in the National Gallery will be among human histories brought into the spotlight, as NG Stories: Making a National Gallery launches this week, an immersive digital experience with online and in-person elements.
NG Stories: Making a National Gallery will be open to the public from 4 October 2024 to 12 January 2025 and will blend the digital and physical worlds to shed light on the people and ideas that shaped the history of the National Gallery as we now know it – many of whom worked behind the scenes or whose names have been forgotten.
Taking over two rooms of the Gallery’s ground floor and accompanied by histories shared online and on social media, NG Stories is one of the key strands of NG200’s digital engagement programme, supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
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NG Stories provides a contemporary exploration of the Gallery’s 200-year history, highlighting lesser-known people using inventive digital methods to make use of rich archival material. Stories range from the Gallery’s first housemaid and the Keepers and porters who lived in the basement of the Gallery to keep the paintings safe around the clock, to the public appeals and key people that have helped acquire new works for the nation.
The on-site experience weaves poignant stories from the public with major milestones from the 200-year history of the Gallery. Online visitors will also have the opportunity to read and share their own experiences; a selection of these will also feature in the Gallery’s new digital display when the Sainsbury Wing reopens in May 2025.
The on-site experience will consist of two rooms, one with interactive and immersive elements that put the visitor ‘in the frame’ as they explore the content, the other providing a large-scale audio-visual digital journey that brings the Gallery’s rich history and connections with the public to life. A cluster of screens will highlight a rotating selection of historical images, showcasing the Gallery’s staff and contributors – including the talents of artists, conservators, copyists and performers – and through a spectacular projection sequence, visitors and historical figures will be brought to life. Both rooms will be unified with a soundscape that enriches the narrative-led screen displays and combines ambient recordingsof the Gallery’s bustling public areas with unique behind-the-scenes recordingsof the vital work that staff conduct in various departments.
The famous wartime concerts of pianist Myra Hess are reimagined as part of the NG Stories projection experience, bringing together archive footage with a newly commissioned soundscape that transports the visitor back to wartime at the Gallery. Online, the people that made her concerts happen are in the spotlight: composer Howard Ferguson, who helped with programming; Hess’s niece Beryl Davies assisted with correspondence; and actor and musician Joyce Grenfell, who worked in the canteen during the concert days. She later wrote, ‘We made sandwiches that became justly famous for being complementary to the music.’
The digital experience also focuses on people that lived in the building from the very start, such as the first Keeper of Paintings William Seguier, the first housemaid Martha Hirst, to Ralph Nicholson Wornum and his family who lived in the building from 1855 to 1871. Wornum was a keen artist himself and kept extremely detailed diaries of his time living and working in the Gallery., He was the father of 14 children, many of whom grew up living in the Gallery in Trafalgar Square.
NG Stories will be free to enter to all Gallery visitors, and the audience responses will have a legacy at the Gallery. The Gallery is currently preparing for a new entrance to the Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, and the redisplay of the collection, both due to be unveiled in May 2025 at the end of the Gallery’s Bicentenary year, and contributions from NG Stories will become part of the digital welcome audiences will receive.
Rosemary Leith, National Gallery Trustee and chair of the Digital Advisory Board, says: ‘NG Stories, along with our other digital offerings in our 200th anniversary year, is a culmination of years of fantastic work by the Gallery and Digital teams to engage with our audiences more deeply. We’re excited to be bringing the National Gallery to the forefront of digital leadership in the gallery and museum sector within the UK and internationally.’
Alan Crookham, Research Manager and Archivist at the National Gallery, says: ‘It’s been a great pleasure to bring the Gallery’s fascinating archives to life in an innovative way. Alongside familiar stories and people, we’ve unearthed many more that are less well known such as Martha Hirst, the Gallery’s first housemaid, or the early history of our brilliant colleagues in the Scientific Department. We’re delighted to share their Gallery journeys with our visitors but also to receive new stories from members of the public. In this way we are both putting our historic archives on display at the same time as we are generating the archives of the future.’
