National Gallery.—This building, in Trafalgar Square, is the chief depository of the pictures belonging to the nation. In 1824, the Government purchased the Angerstein collection of 38 pictures, for £57,000, and exhibited it for a time at a house in Pall Mall. The present structure was finished in 1838, at a cost of about £100,000, from the designs of Mr. Wilkins. Since that year till 1869, the Royal Academy occupied the eastern half, and the National Gallery the western. In the last-named year, the Royal Academy was removed to Burlington House; and the whole of the building is now what its name denotes. This National Gallery now comprises the Angerstein collection, together with numerous pictures presented to the nation by Lord Farnborough, Sir George Beaumont, the Rev. Holwell Carr, Mr. Vernon, and other persons; and, most recent of all, the Turner collection, bequeathed to the nation by that greatest of our landscape painters. Every year, likewise, witnesses the purchase of choice old pictures out of funds provided by Parliament. The grant annually is about £10,000. To accommodate the constantly increasing collection, the centre of the building was re-constructed in 1861, and a very handsome new saloon built, in which are deposited the choicest examples of the Italian Schools of Painting: forming, with its contents, one of the noblest rooms of the kind in Europe. To name the pictures in this collection would be to name some of the finest works of the Italian, Spanish, Flemish, and French schools of painters. Some of the most costly of the pictures are the following:—Murillo’s ‘Holy Family,’ £3000; Rubens’s ‘Rape of the Sabines,’ £3000; Francia’s ‘Virgin and Child,’ £3500; Sebastian del Piombo’s ‘Raising of Lazarus,’ 3500 guineas; Coreggio’s ‘Holy Family,’ £3800; Perugino’s ‘Virgin and Child,’ £4000; Claude’s ‘Seaport,’ £4000; Rubens’s ‘Judgment of Paris,’ £4200; Raffaelle’s ‘St. Catherine,’ £5000; Rembrandt’s ‘Woman taken in Adultery,’ £5250; Correggio’s ‘Ecce Homo,’ and ‘Mercury instructing Cupid,’ 10,000 guineas; and Paul Veronese’s ‘Family of Darius,’ £14,000.

Royal Academy, Burlington House.—The Academy was established in 1768, for the encouragement of the fine arts. Until the finishing of Mr. Wilkin’s building, the Academy held its meetings and exhibitions in a small number of rooms at Somerset House. Students are admitted on evidence of sufficient preliminary training, and taught gratuitously; but so far as the public is concerned, the Royal Academy is chiefly known by its famous Annual Exhibition of modern English pictures and sculptures, from May to July. This Exhibition is a very profitable affair to the Academy. Royal commissions and parliamentary committees find a difficulty in investigating the revenues, privileges, and claims of the Academy; it is known, however, that the schools are maintained out of the profits. Concerning the building in Trafalgar Square, most persons agree that the main front is too much cut up in petty detail, and that one of the finest sites in Europe has thus been comparatively neglected. Some have humorously nicknamed it “The National Cruet Stand.”

National Portrait Gallery.—This infant gallery, established by the nation in 1857, is now at Exhibition Road, South Kensington. The object is to be strictly confined to the collecting of a series of national portraits of persons of any note, whether of early or of late days. A sum of £2000 a-year is voted for this purpose. The collection is yet only small, but very interesting, and is yearly increasing. Open free on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Soane Museum.—This closely-packed collection, presented to the nation by the late Sir John Soane, the architect, occupies the house which he used to inhabit, at No. 13, on the north side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Every nook and corner of about 24 rooms is crowded with works of art—sarcophagi, ancient gems and intaglios, medals and coins, sculptures, sketches and models of sculptures, books of prints, portfolios of drawings, Hogarth’s famous series of pictures of the ‘Rake’s Progress,’ and numerous other examples of vertu, some of which cost large sums of money. The place is open every Wednesday from February to August inclusive, and every Thursday and Friday in April, May, and June, from 10 till 4. Still, these are very insufficient facilities (only 56 days out of the 365 in the year) for seeing a fine collection of treasures. Orders for admission are sent, on application, by post.

Art Exhibitions.—There are always numerous picture exhibitions open in the summer months—such as those formed by the British Institution, the Society of British Artists, the Society of Painters in Water Colours, &c.; concerning which information can be seen in the advertisement columns of the newspapers. At the British Institution there is a spring exhibition of modern pictures, and a summer exhibition of ancient. The price of admission to such places is almost invariably One Shilling. Other exhibitions, pertaining more to entertainment than to fine arts, are briefly noticed in a later section.