Gabriele Finaldi and John Booth
The National Gallery’s extraordinary year was, according to John Booth, its chair of trustees, founded on food. When he took over the top job in September 2021, he had served on the board of the National Gallery for just a few months, as liaison trustee of the Tate Gallery. He didn’t know Gabriele Finaldi, the gallery’s director since 2015, personally: ‘I’d only really met him on Zoom meetings.’ Since Booth believes that the most crucial relationship in any institution is ‘between the chief executive and the chair’ he proposed that they get to know each other better.
First Finaldi took Booth out to an Italian restaurant – ‘we shared a good bottle of wine and so on and we must have chatted for three hours, one of those good long lunches’ – and later the hosting duties swapped and Booth invited Finaldi to his home in Sussex, where they cooked supper together (‘I gave him my recipe for pasta with anchovies and spinach, he now uses it at home,’ Booth says). Food eaten, wine drunk, they decided that yes, they could work together.
Thanks to those meals, a double act was formed that has yielded unprecedented results. First was the NG200 birthday celebrations marking the gallery’s bicentenary that raised £95 million and culminated in a much-lauded remodelling of the Sainsbury Wing and a thoroughgoing rehang across the gallery. Then, in September, came the announcement of Project Domani, a hugely ambitious scheme to demolish St Vincent House behind the existing gallery, currently occupied by a hotel and offices, and construct an entirely new building to house a suite of galleries. Remarkably, £375 million has already been raised, based on two gifts of Brobdingnagian proportions – £150 million from Michael Moritz and Harriet Heyman’s Crankstart foundation, and another £150 million from the Julia Rausing Trust. So Booth and Finaldi have, in the middle of challenging financial times, managed to raise nearly half a billion pounds in donations.
Booth comes from a business background with interests in e-commerce, media and telecommunications; he also set up his own charitable foundation and is, among other roles, vice president of the King’s Trust, Chairman of the Royal Drawing School and a trustee of the Chatsworth Settlement and the Arts Foundation. Finaldi’s provenance takes in a curatorship at the National Gallery with responsibility for the later Italian paintings and the Spanish collection and the role of deputy director for collections and research at the Prado, where he also oversaw the project to build a new extension in 2007 and the opening of the Research Centre in 2008.
Given their preexisting eminence, there is a distinct lack of ego in their dynamic. From the start of their relationship Finaldi was determined that they should appear as a pair: ‘I was very keen that when we appeared publicly together we should both speak,’ he says. ‘So we’re both saying things publicly and people are seeing us side by side and that we are working very closely together.’
When they started their collaboration in 2021, the bicentenary plans were already underway but, as Finaldi puts it, ‘With John, those plans grew more ambitious, and it turned out to be a very wide-ranging project. He gives you the kind of confidence to plan big.’ And given that fundraising has been at the top of their list, ‘he did an amazing thing, which was when we began the fundraising process for NG200, he committed immediately a very considerable sum from his own foundation, and that sets you off’. Finaldi admits that it hardly needs saying, but ‘he’s a very kind man and very generous’.
Even so, the amount they and the National Gallery team have raised is still a shock to Booth: ‘To be honest, having done a lot of fundraising in my life, this still amazes me.’ That job is not over yet but Finaldi and Booth have a method that clearly works. ‘I lead on the building of relationships with donors and prospective donors,’ Booth says. ‘I suppose what I do is to warm them up with the vision that the board and the director have agreed on and then, at the right moment, Gabriele will come and tell them the story – with all the conviction that he has – that this is the right direction for the institution. He’s actually very good at fundraising because of his authenticity.’
These honed skills can’t be put away just yet. Architect applications for the gallery on Orange Steet have now closed, with more than 60 designs submitted: the winner will be announced in early spring 2026. And although Booth’s tenure has recently been extended for another four years, it will be a different Chair who cuts the ribbon on the new building. Nevertheless, he says, ‘it will be nice to help choose the architect and see the building start to rise from the ground’. More prosaically, ‘I hate to think of the running costs of a new building these days. I wouldn’t want to see us build a new wing and not have the money to keep the lights on.’
It is Finaldi who will need to source the paintings that make it worth keeping those lights burning. ‘That’s a big ambition,’ he says, ‘because we want to have a representation of post-1900 painting which is of the same quality as the National Gallery collection.’ Finaldi ‘needed to be convinced that it could be done before we launched into it’ and both he and Booth know that part of their future role will be to manage expectations. ‘It will be done over time,’ Finaldi stresses. ‘In these circumstances, you’ve got to be quite innovative and quite original in the way you approach this challenge. For example, there’s lots of opportunities for exchanges between institutions that we don’t do enough of – we do it for exhibitions, but we don’t do it on a longer-term basis.’
But before Finaldi and Booth hurtle headlong into that project they should find time to share another meal – homecooked or otherwise – and reflect on their momentous 2025.
Michael Prodger, senior research fellow at the University of Buckingham and art critic for the New Statesman.
