A person walks past the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, London.
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LONDON – Hidden in a pillar he funded but despised, Lord Sainsbury finally got the last word.
“TO WHOM THIS NOTE IS FOUND,” wrote John Sainsbury, a member of the House of Lords, also known as Baron Sainsbury of Preston Candover. It was July 1990. He was 62 years old. His letter was typewritten, in all capital letters.
Sainsbury, whose family founded the Sainsbury supermarket chain in the late 19th century, was then chairman of the family-owned group, which also owns Shaw supermarkets in the United States.
An art-loving billionaire, he and his brothers had in 1985 has committed to funding a major extension to London’s National Gallery. (The cost was undisclosed, but is believed to have been in the tens of millions of dollars.) The family also donated paintings to the museum, including works by Degas, Gauguin, Monet, and Rousseau. The Sainsbury Wing was opened by Queen Elizabeth II in July 1991.
But a year earlier, during its construction, Lord Sainsbury had been unhappy with its design. He was particularly annoyed by the two pillars that flanked the entrance hall of the new wing. They were decorative, not structural. He found them useless and ugly.
Sainsbury’s continued to sponsor them, however, but typed his objections in a 1990 letter.
More than three decades later, the Sainsbury Wing was undergoing another renovation. Last winter, demolition workers were removing the two columns and discovered Sainsbury’s letter hidden inside one of them, in a plastic folder.
It read: “IF YOU FIND THIS NOTE, YOU MUST PARTICIPATE IN DESTROYING ONE OF THE FAKE COLUMNS.” He went on to call these columns “ARCHITECTS’ MISTAKES.”
“KNOW THAT ONE OF THE SPONSORS OF THIS BUILDING IS ABSOLUTELY HAPPY THAT YOUR GENERATION HAS DECIDED TO IGNORE THESE UNNECESSARY COLUMNS,” he wrote and signed on Sainsbury’s letterhead.
Sainsbury died in 2022, aged 94.
His son is Mark Sainsbury. told the BBC that his father’s brother and sponsor, the late Simon Sainsbury, had made a “deal”, convincing John Sainsbury to continue funding, in exchange for recording his dissent about the design, in the form of this secret letter.
Mark Sainsbury said of the recent discovery in the letter: “He never said I told you so, but he would raise an eyebrow and smile sarcastically that we had finally figured it out.”
When the original Sainsbury Wing was built, the director of the National Gallery was Neil MacGregor. an interview published this week with Art Newspaperan industry publication, MacGregor recalled this dispute between Sainsbury and the wing’s architects, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. But MacGregor said he ultimately approved the design.
He was quoted as saying: “I feel that, after all, we should let architects be architects.”
Sainsbury’s widow Anya, a former ballerina, was present when her husband’s will was transferred to the museum’s historical archive for safekeeping.
“I am delighted that John’s letter has been found again after all these years,” she said. speak Art Newspaper. “And I feel he would be relieved and delighted with the new gallery plans and the expanded space they are creating.”
The newly refurbished Sainsbury Wing is expected to reopen next year — without any pillars.
