National Gallery Shortlisted for £120K Art Fund Prize
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- The National Gallery is one of five museums shortlisted for the Art Fund's £120,000 Museum of the Year prize, with curators posing 10 questions about their collection
- Van Gogh's Sunflowers anchors the quiz, with a question about how many versions of the painting he created in total — five, seven, or three
- Paul Delaroche's Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833) features a question about how long the 17-year-old reigned before her 1554 beheading — nine days, two weeks, or one month and two days
- Manet's Execution of Maximilian (c. 1867-8) was cut up by the artist's family after his death, and the quiz asks which of three artists — Renoir, Degas, or Toulouse-Lautrec — acquired and combined the surviving fragments on one canvas
- Turner's The Fighting Temeraire (1839) is described in the quiz as 'often regarded as the most popular painting in the UK,' with a question about the artist's London birthplace
- Botticelli's Venus and Mars (c. 1485) prompts a question about which Florentine family — Medici, Pazzi, or Vespucci — is rumoured to have commissioned the mythological work
- Holbein's Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan (1538) is the portrait of a woman who famously rejected a European royal after posing — Emperor Charles V, King Francis I, or King Henry VIII
Why it matters: The National Gallery competes with four other shortlisted museums for the £120,000 Art Fund prize, the UK's largest single museum award. For readers, the quiz surfaces lesser-known collection details — like Manet's family-butchered canvas reassembled by a buyer — that standard collection tours skip.
