Britain's 200-Year-Old National Museum

Throughout the National Gallery’s 200-year history, the London museum’s collection has served as both a cultural touchstone and a flashpoint for political swirl. In 1914, suffragist Mary Richardson strode into the gallery with a meat cleaver and slashed Diego Velázquez’s depiction of a mirrored nude woman, The Toilet of Venus (also called the Rokeby Venus), to protest the arrest of a fellow activist. During World War II, the gallery hid its masterpieces in Welsh mines for safekeeping, leaving a rotating “picture of the month” as a cultural reprieve for a bombed and battered London. Nearly 80 years later, in 2020, the gallery closed for an unprecedented 111 days, shifting, like other museums, to digital outreach amid the uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic.