MANY READERS OF this Magazine probably visit the National Gallery in London for a specific reason – to see a temporary exhibition or a particular painting such as a new acquisition. To reach our goal, we pass through a few familiar rooms, lulled by the comfort of finding things in their usual place (or so we like to think); we are anaesthetised by such familiarity and, for the most part, our pleasure is uncomplicated. But to gain an impression of the whole – the sequence of rooms, the flow of century and school, the unfolding narrative – is a rare experience. To visit the seventy or so rooms directed by a wish to examine the conceptual framework of the collection’s display and the visual logic of the hang within each one, we may find that pleasure is not our overriding reaction and that logic is often difficult to discern.

Anyone reading Jonathan Conlin’s history of the Gallery or Charles Saumarez-Smith’s essay on the changing displays there since the 1930s might be surprised by just how often in recent decades the galleries and hang have been altered. There is a raft of reasons for this, all of which have their bearing on how the Gallery looks today. First there are the two major physical additions – the north wing galleries on Orange Street, opened in 1975, and the Sainsbury Wing in 1990. The latter removed all the earlier part of the collection to a virtual annexe and, so specifically designed was it to accommodate the early Renaissance holdings, that it is unlikely to change in any fundamental way. Within its own terms it remains successful but it has forever dislocated a visitor’s experience of the full chronological sequence of the collection, for the general public seems to prefer to enter through the Portico rather than the less tempting Sainsbury doors. Others may now go in at the 2004 Getty Entrance where catering, marketing and the marble-clad mediocrity of the atrium provide a discordant introduction to the galleries above. As for the north-wing rooms, now that their 1970s decor has been transformed, they afford good if somewhat bland accommodation predominantly for Dutch and Flemish paintings.

Further reasons for continual change at the Gallery include the personal taste of the successive directors; the changing expectations of visitors; and the incorporation of new acquisitions and loans. Above all, displays are inflected (from subtly to radically) by the prevailing orthodoxies of display and the (sometimes related) mutability of art history. The sequential arrangement of the galleries and the story or stories they tell is perhaps the most contentious and potentially disturbing consideration that any Director must grasp.

The old division into national schools, while still apparent in many rooms, has been more recently injected by two directives – chronology and subject-matter. There is a dispiriting example of the latter in the room (41) entitled ‘Academicians and Landscape Painters’ – side by side on one wall hang Delaroche’s Execution of Lady Jane Grey, Puvis’s Beheading of St John the Baptist and the single-frame fragments of Manet’s Execution of the Emperor Maximilian. Brushing aside the fact that landscape is hardly present and that only one of the artists might be termed ‘academic’, the connections are minimal. Once the theme of execution has been absorbed – hardly difficult – other affinities (beyond ‘big’ and ‘French’) scarcely exist in three works so different in concept, genre, style, palette and intention. That martyrdom and political assassination have been uppermost in recent world events (when have they not?) is no sure reason for this thematic turkey. If the Gallery wishes to hang by theme or correspondence, it must be undertaken only within the lucid context of the overall narrative.

Many rooms do in fact give the visitor a clear sense of time and place, a terra firma from which to launch individual explorations. ‘Veronese and Venice’ (31) reigns supreme; single-artist rooms (Crivelli, Claude, Poussin) are exemplary. But visual seemliness in a good number of the galleries is lacking: some of the wall colours are ripe for revision – the unhappy sludge for Leonardo and North Italy (2); the salmon-pink for Holland and Flanders (25 to 28); the majority of rooms display about two too many works; there are unrewarding juxtapositions; limping spatial rhythms along too many walls; too much hanging by large-small-large-small; ill-matched double-hanging (look at Cézanne’s compact self-portrait, too low on the wall, cowed by a still life); the pitiless skying of Reynolds’s Countess of Albemarle; small works by Murillo and Zurbarán as afterthoughts to the group of El Grecos; worse, perhaps, is the incomprehensibility, both visual and historic, of the Dutch rooms, which are more reminiscent of an old-master sale preview than one of the world’s superlative collections of Dutch painting.

One of the most awkward spaces is the sententiously decorated Central Hall, directly ahead up the main stairs. At present it holds selected Venetian paintings, Titian above all, because, to quote a curator, the ‘British people love art from the Italian Renaissance’. They are bereft of context, appearing almost as amuses-bouche to the great repast beyond. Might this room (something of a catastrophe in terms of perambulation) be suitable for a word-and-image introduction to the history of the Gallery itself? Good use is made of part of the basement with the ArtStart area, where the collection is available on screen through a multiplicity of searches from artists A to Z to themes such as horses, music and food (but not beheading).

As will have become obvious, these comments focus on the Gallery’s public face rather than its internal workings or even its acquisitions and exhibitions. Negative as some of them are, they are the result of familiarity and objective consideration. At the same time they preface a welcome to Nicholas Penny, the incoming Director, not as a discouraging deterrent but as a sign of the affection in which the National Gallery is held as it enters what is bound to be an invigorating new phase of its existence.