National Museum Cardiff (Welsh: Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Caerdydd), formerly known as the National Museum of Wales, is a museum and art gallery in Cardiff, Wales. The museum is part of the wider network of Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales. Entry is kept free by a grant from the Welsh Government. In February 2025 the museum announced a temporary closure due to maintenance funding issues.
History The National Museum of Wales was founded in 1905, with its royal charter granted in 1907. Part of the bid for Cardiff to obtain the National Museum for Wales included the gift of the Cardiff Museum Collection, then known as "Welsh Museum of Natural History, Archaeology and Art," which was formally handed over in 1912. The Cardiff Museum was sharing the building of Cardiff Library, and was a sub-department of the library until 1893. Construction of a new building in the civic complex of Cathays Park began in 1912, but owing to the First World War it did not open to the public until 1922, with the official opening taking place in 1927. The architects were Arnold Dunbar Smith and Cecil Brewer, although the building as it now stands is a heavily truncated version of their design. The sculpture scheme for the building was devised by Sir W. Goscombe John and consisted of the groups Prehistoric Period and Classic Period by Gilbert Bayes as well as Learning, Mining, and Shipping by Thomas J Clapperton, Art by Bertram Pegram, Medieval Period by Richard Garbe, Music by David Evans, and others. D. Arthur Thomas was commissioned to produce a model for the dragons, and A. Bertram Pegram to produce a model for the lions that were placed around the base of the dome.
Present The museum has collections of botany, fine and applied art, geology, and zoology. Archaeology has been moved to the St Fagans National Museum of History. In 2011, with funding from the Clore Duffield Foundation, the former Glanely Gallery was transformed into the Clore Discovery Centre, which offers hands-on exploration of the museum's 7.5 million items that are normally in storage, including insects, fossils and Bronze Age weapons. School groups, formal and informal groups can also be accommodated but should book in advance. Between 2022-2024 internal management disputes between the-then president of the museum, Roger Lewis, who had formerly run the Welsh Rugby Union, and the-then director-general, David Anderson, saw both leave the museum. The handling of the dispute, which concluded with a settlement to Mr Anderson of £325,000, with legal bills bringing the total cost to the Senedd of over £600,000, drew criticism from Audit Wales.
Black Lives Matter movement Following the removal of the Statue of Edward Colston in Bristol on 6 June 2020, Wales Online reported on a similar campaign to remove monuments to Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Picton, a Welsh soldier, in Carmarthen and Cardiff. While Picton was revered as a hero in the 19th century after dying at the Battle of Waterloo, the most senior British Army officer to lose his life, his previous record as governor of Trinidad was controversial even at the time, and saw him convicted of widespread abuse of the island's population, including the use of torture. In November 2021, the museum removed a 19th-century portrait of Sir Thomas by Sir Martin Archer Shee and replaced it with a painting of a Welsh gardener by Albert Houthuesen. The museum commissioned artists to re-examine the legacy of Sir Thomas.
Closure The museum has experienced severe funding difficulties for most of the 2020s and in 2024 its chief executive expressed concern that it may be forced to close as a result of a lack of funding for maintenance repairs necessary to keep the building safe for visitors and staff. Lesley Griffiths, then Cabinet Secretary for Culture and Social Justice (Wales), refuted this claim, giving an assurance that the "National Museum is not closing". In early February 2025 the museum announced a "temporary closure" due to "building maintenance and health and safety concerns". The museum reopened on 7 February 2025, but the closure prompted media discussion regarding the levels of Senedd funding for cultural and historic buildings and events.
Art collection
The collection of Old Master paintings at National Museum Cardiff includes, among other notable works, The Virgin and Child Between Saint Helena and Saint Francis by Amico Aspertini, The Poulterer's Shop by Frans Snyders, and A Calm by Jan van de Cappelle. Since 2016, the museum has had Rembrandt's 1657 Portrait of Catharina Hooghsaet on permanent display. In 2019, a painting depicting the Madonna and Child with a Pomegranate, which was thought to be a late copy by a lesser artist of a lost work by Sandro Botticelli, featured on the television programme Britain's Lost Masterpieces where, after conservation treatment by Simon Gillespie and research by Bendor Grosvenor, it was confirmed to be from the studio of Botticelli, with parts by the master himself. A collection of landscape paintings in the classical tradition includes works by Claude, Gaspard Dughet, Salvator Rosa and two works by Nicolas Poussin: The Funeral of Phocion (1648) and The Finding of Moses (the latter owned jointly by the Museum and the National Gallery, London). These works prefigure the career of the Welsh-born Richard Wilson, called "the father of British landscape painting". In 1979 four cartoons for tapestries illustrating scenes from the Aeneid were bought as works by Peter Paul Rubens, but the attribution is now disputed. There is a gallery devoted to British patronage of the 18th century, in particular that of Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn. Included is a portrait of Williams-Wynn in Rome with fellow Tourists by Pompeo Batoni, one of his second wife by Sir Joshua Reynolds and his chamber organ designed by Robert Adam. Other paintings of note from this period is a portrait of Viscountess Elizabeth Bulkeley of Beaumaris as the mythological character Hebe, by the "sublime and terrible" George Romney, and Johann Zoffany's group portrait of Henry Knight, a Glamorgan landowner, with his children.
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