The National Gallery of British Art is much better known as the Tate Gallery - after its founder, the industrialist Sir Henry Tate. It was his private collection formed the basis of the future museum, which has represented British fine art from the 1500s to the present day. The gallery was opened to the public in 1897. It now houses more than 60,000 of paintings, drawings and prints.
During the World War II, the gallery building was damaged by bombing, but almost all the exhibits were evacuated, and those that could not be removed were safely sheltered and protected. After the war the gallery reopened in 1949.
The building of the museum was repeatedly expanded and completed. In 1987. Clore Gallery was opened, displaying the most extensive collection of Turner's paintings. The oldest painting in the museum is Portrait of a Man in a Black Cap (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 Gallery, which presents a collection of European and American paintings created after 1900. It housed in a former power station building, which has been completely converted into a a museum. In the halls of this gallery there are works by Kandinsky, Malevich and Chagall. It is noteworthy that the Tate Modern places paintings not in chronological order, as is common in most museums, but grouped by theme: "Still Life, object, real life", "Landscape and environment", "Historical painting", "Nudes, Action, Body".
