Hidden Letter Found During Museum Renovation Has Biting Message

Museums and galleries display treasures found out in the field, so finding a piece of history in the museum building itself is a rarity, to say the least. But that's exactly what happened during recent renovations at the National Gallery in London. 

According to The Art Newspaper, contractors working at the National Gallery's Sainsbury Wing found quite a time capsule during demolition work last year that has just been unveiled. The letter, dated July 26, 1990, was written by John Sainsbury, the Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover, one of the wing's funders. Sainsbury, who died in 2022, was the onetime president of U.K. supermarket chain Sainsbury's and issued his letter with a Sainsbury's letterhead. 

"If you have found this note, you must be engaged in demolishing one of the false columns that have been placed in the foyer of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery. I believe that the false columns are a mistake of the architect and that we would live to regret our accepting this detail of his design," the letter read.

"Let it be known that one of the donors of this building is absolutely delighted that your generation has decided to dispense with the unnecessary columns," Sainsbury concluded, speaking for himself. 

Needless to say Sainsbury wasn't pleased some of the choices of American architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who chose to install two huge false columns in the gallery's foyer purely for decoration with no architectural purpose. 

Per The Art Newspaper, Sainsbury got into the construction site while the wing was being built at the turn of the 1990s and dropped his letter into the concrete column. It was able to survive for decades thanks to its protection in a plastic folder. 

For now, the famous letter has been entered into the National Gallery's archive as a historic document. It's not every day a museum building itself is found to contain pieces of the past.