ECR French Nineteenth-Century Art Network presents:

Curatorial Roundtable: The National Gallery at 200. Re-hanging the 19th and 20th centuries

Thursday 19 June 2025, 1600 BST // 1700 CEST // 1100 EDT // 800 PDT

For the first time since the Second World War, the National Gallery, London, is undertaking a complete rehang of its collection. As the grand finale of the museum’s year-long bicentenary celebrations, this gallery-wide rethinking of the collection—The Wonder of Art—opens on 10 May 2025. Spanning from the 13th to the early 20th century, the Gallery’s holdings of Western Art include many notable examples of nineteenth-century French painting, such as Édouard Manet's The Execution of Maximilian, Georges Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières, and Paul Cezanne’s Bathers. While the narrative remains broadly chronological, the installation will now be punctuated by thematic rooms that are both transnational and transhistorical, focusing on specific media or artistic genres.

This network session will offer an opportunity to look behind the scenes of this major project; to hear directly from two curators who have brought these ideas to life; and to discover the many considerations that inform a hang, from conservation through to design aesthetics. Learn about the curatorial discussions behind the new display: Which were the key factors behind the main decisions? And how did design solutions impact the hang?

Speaker Bios:

Sarah Herring is Associate Curator of Post-1800 paintings at the National Gallery, London. She has a particular interest in landscape and published The Nineteenth Century French Paintings. Volume 1, The Barbizon School (2019), part of the series of National Gallery Schools Catalogues. With Emma Capron, she was co-curator of the exhibition Discover Manet and Eva Gonzalès (2022–23), which explored a number of themes around Manet’s imposing portrait, including the education and position of women artists in the nineteenth century. She is the curator of a focused exhibition devoted to Jean-François Millet (7 August–19 October 2025).

Dr Chiara Di Stefano is Associate Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, London. She received her PhD from the Sorbonne University in Paris, with a thesis focusing on the impact of prehistoric art on twentieth-century artists. Before joining the National Gallery, she worked at the Centre Pompidou – Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, where she collaborated on a redisplay of the permanent collection and on the exhibition Prehistory: A modern enigma (2019). In the past ten years, she published extensively on modern art and the history of collecting. At the National Gallery, she co-curated with Anne Robbins the exhibition Degas and Miss La La (2024). She is currently co-curating Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists (13 September 2025–8 February 2026).