When London Lined Up to See One Painting in an Empty Museum

Feature image: Andrea Mantegna, The Triumphs of Caesar: 1, The Trumpeters (cropped), mid-1480s-before 1506 via The National Gallery, London. Picture of the month, October 2026.

Public museums train visitors to expect abundance, room after room of pictures arranged by school and century. The National Gallery in London owes one of its longest-running traditions to the opposite condition, a building emptied of every painting it owned. The Picture of the Month began in 1942 as a wartime compromise, a single masterpiece carried back from hiding and hung alone for a city under bombardment. Its origins lie in a sculptor's letter to a newspaper, a director who acted on it within weeks, and a public that queued to stand in front of one canvas. Eighty-four years later, the Gallery still names a Picture of the Month, and the story of how it started remains one of the clearest accounts of what a national collection is for.

In 1938, with war approaching, the Gallery's trustees approved a plan to remove the collection from London, and a small rehearsal that year tested the route to Wales. The full evacuation began on 23 August 1939 and took ten days. By the time Britain declared war on 3 September 1939, every painting had been crated and dispersed to secure locations across England and Wales, among them Penrhyn Castle near Bangor.

In 1940, the threat of invasion produced a plan to ship the collection to Canada. Kenneth Clark, the Gallery's director, took the question to Winston Churchill, and the prime minister's reported answer settled it. "Hide them in caves and cellars, but not one picture shall leave this island." Assistant keeper Martin Davies and scientific adviser Ian Rawlins searched for an underground site and found Manod, a slate quarry in the mountains near Blaenau Ffestiniog. By September 1940, they had chosen the quarry; they built storage rooms inside its caverns, and the first truckloads of paintings arrived in August 1941 to rest beneath 200 feet of rock.

Trafalgar Square was left with bare walls, and Clark kept the doors open. The pianist Myra Hess began a series of daily lunchtime concerts on 10 October 1939; temporary exhibitions of contemporary British painting and war artists' commissions filled a few rooms from 1940, and the building itself took nine bomb hits between October 1940 and April 1941. Londoners could hear Beethoven in the Gallery at lunchtime while the Old Masters stayed in Wales.

The prompt came from a new acquisition. In 1941 the National Art Collections Fund gave the Gallery a portrait signed and dated 1661, welcomed at the time as a late work by Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, Wife of Jacob Trip (1661). The Times printed an illustration of it, and on 3 January 1942 the paper carried a response from the sculptor Charles Wheeler. The reproduction, Wheeler wrote, made him long for the original, which he assumed was bound for storage until the war ended. London was battered, he observed, and "we need more than ever to see beautiful things." Music lovers still had their Beethoven, so picture lovers deserved their Rembrandts. His proposal was practical, with the trustees risking one picture each week and moving it to a strong room whenever an alert sounded.

Clark replied in the same pages on 19 January 1942, and he answered with the painting itself. The portrait went on view that Monday for about three weeks, with the assurance that it would come down every night to a strong shelter. The next morning, The Times reported a large crowd in front of it. On 31 January 1942 the paper announced the trustees' decision to show one important picture every three weeks, and Clark invited readers to send a postcard naming the works they most wanted to see again. The Gallery today catalogs the portrait that started it all as "Probably by Rembrandt," following technical study that judged its signature inauthentic.

The postcards shaped everything that followed. Writing to Davies in Wales on 5 February 1942, Clark reported that the requests pointed away from Dutch painting and realistic scenes of any kind, and he read in them a wish to contemplate humanity at its most elevated. He set aside the Pieter de Hooch he had planned to open with and turned to religious painting. Two pictures led the requests. One was The Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane (1590s), bought in 1919 as an El Greco and now assigned to his studio. The other was Titian's Noli me Tangere (about 1514).

Titian's canvas reached London in March 1942. The Gallery's archive records it on view in the West Vestibule from 12 March to 21 April 1942, hung each day on a portable screen beside a panel of explanatory material and carried each night to a shelter in the basement. The subject comes from the Gospel of John, where the risen Christ meets Mary Magdalene in the garden and tells her "do not touch me," the meaning of the Latin title. A painting about a beloved figure standing just beyond reach met a city that had lived through the Blitz, and it drew large crowds.

The arrangement inverted the ordinary museum visit. In 1942, a visitor crossed a near-empty building to spend unhurried time with a single object, and scarcity turned looking into the whole event. Wheeler's letter had started from a newspaper reproduction and ended as a plea for the original, and the queues in the West Vestibule bore him out. Charles Saumarez Smith, the Gallery's director from 2002 to 2007, has written that the crowds came for consolation and for a rare, private encounter with the art of the past. The practical routine supported that mood. Paintings traveled from Manod in pairs, each took its turn on the screen, and each went down to the strong room when the Gallery closed for the night.

The scheme ran for the rest of the war, with a new painting brought up from Wales roughly once a month and each arrival treated as a news event. Clark's selections leaned toward religious and mythological subjects, in keeping with the February 1942 postcards. Accounts differ on the final tally. The Gallery's own history names the thirty-seventh picture as the last, while Suzanne Bosman's 2008 study The National Gallery in Wartime counts forty-three shown in succession.

The last choice broke the pattern. Pierre-Auguste Renoir's The Umbrellas (about 1881-86) was the only Impressionist painting in the wartime series, a modern Parisian subject shown as the fighting in Europe drew to a close. On 4 May 1945 Davies sent a telegram from Manod announcing the return of the masterpieces, and within days of the end of hostilities in Europe a first selection of paintings was back in Trafalgar Square. The collection that had left London in ten days in 1939 was coming home, and the Picture of the Month outlived the emergency that created it.

The Gallery still names a Picture of the Month, now as a monthly feature on its website that pairs one painting with an essay, a film, or a conversation with a curator. Titian's Noli me Tangere has returned to the slot twice in recent years, in October 2019 and again in October 2022, accompanied each time by a wartime photograph of the canvas on display in the emptied Gallery. In June 2020, during the pandemic, the choice went to an online public vote, and Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun's Self Portrait in a Straw Hat (1782) won. The postcards Clark requested in 1942 had found their successor.

Recent selections range far beyond the religious pictures of 1942. In May 2024, director Gabriele Finaldi marked the Gallery's 200th birthday by choosing Piero della Francesca's The Baptism of Christ (probably about 1437-45). The 2026 calendar has included Rembrandt's Self-Portrait at the Age of 63 (1669) in January, Catharina van Hemessen's Portrait of a Woman (1551) for International Women's Day in March, and Claude Monet's The Beach at Trouville (1870) in August. In March 2027, the tradition reaches its eighty-fifth anniversary, with the painting that opened it still in the collection for any visitor to stand in front of.

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