[1] It depicts a fictitious art gallery envisaged by Witherington, hung with many British paintings of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

[3] The gallery space is entirely imaginary and the real works meticulously recreated belonged to numerous different private collections.

With the notable exception of Thomas Lawrence's John Philip Kemble as Hamlet the genre of fashionable portrait paintings, which dominated the art market at the time, is excluded.

The inclusion of so much recent work, much of it by Royal Academicians, may have been intended as a riposte to the real National Gallery.

[4] Around half of the thirty so visible paintings have been identified including Thomas Gainsborough's The Harvest Wagon, Richard Wilson's A View on the Arno, John Hoppner's Sleeping Nymph and Cupid John Opie's Damon and Musidora, Joshua Reynolds' The Infant Academy, David Wilkie's A Highland Whisky Still and Turner's Sun Rising through Vapour.