In 1887, Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee year, Crace was the decorator for a major reconstruction of the entrance hall of the National Gallery, carried out by the architect Sir John Taylor (1833-1912) of the Office of Works, surveyor of Royal Palaces and Public Buildings. Taylor created the present main staircase with flights leading northwards (to his new rooms), eastwards and westwards, while leading minor staircases off the lower hall. The architectural framework of the entrance hall is unchanged but the polychrome decoration of the plasterwork in the Italian Renaissance style has not been maintained and above the line of the columns is now entirely painted white. There are no longer pictures on the wall leading to the West wing entrance. The green silk-effect wall hangings between the columns have now been replaced with wallpaper covering all the walls of the entrance. The entrance screen was in fact designed to look like stone inlaid with marble. In the place of the proposed mural over the entrance doors, which was never executed, now hangs Cimabue's celebrated Madonna carried in Procession by Frederic, Lord Leighton, on loan from the Royal Collection.
The tracing paper overlay has extensive notes towards the achievement of the fully finished perspective of the scheme, which Crace presented to Sir Charles Holroyd, director of the National Gallery in 1917. This drawing is now hanging in the visitors waiting room in the National Gallery (see G. Waterfield, Palaces of Art: Art Galleries in Britain 1790-1990, London, 1991, pp.105-106).