London, The National Gallery
Two centuries on from a parliamentary vote and a purchase of thirty-eight pictures, the National Gallery holds one of the finest collections of European painting anywhere, and still charges nothing to see it.
Most of Europe's great galleries began as royal collections that were opened to the public later. The National Gallery did not. In 1824 Parliament voted £57,000 to buy thirty-eight paintings from the estate of the banker John Julius Angerstein, and the nation acquired a collection it had to find a home for. The first was Angerstein's own house at 100 Pall Mall, which was quickly outgrown.
William Wilkins's building on Trafalgar Square opened in 1838, on a site chosen for a democratic reason: it sat between the wealthy west of London and the poorer east, so that everyone could reach it on foot.
The collection
The early acquisitions were mostly Italian pictures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, many still on the walls. The collection now runs from about 1250 to 1900 and numbers something over two thousand three hundred paintings. An agreement with the Tate in 1996 fixed that upper boundary: works after 1900 pass to what is now Tate Britain and Tate Modern, and a series of transfers followed.
The famous pictures are famous for good reason. Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait appears in nearly every history of art. Holbein's The Ambassadors hides its skull in plain sight. Velázquez's Rokeby Venus carries a history of its own — a suffragette, Mary Richardson, slashed it in 1914 in protest at the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst, and the repairs are invisible today.
Leonardo is represented twice over, by the London version of the Virgin of the Rocks and by the Burlington House Cartoon, the Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist — a full-size preparatory drawing in charcoal and chalk rather than a painting, and none the lesser for it.
Elsewhere: Piero della Francesca's Baptism of Christ, Uccello's Battle of San Romano, Botticelli's Venus and Mars, Rembrandt's Self Portrait at the Age of 34, Vermeer's A Young Woman standing at a Virginal, and Canaletto's Regatta on the Grand Canal and The Stonemason's Yard, the second a quieter and better picture than the first.
Two arrivals stand out among modern purchases: Titian's Death of Actaeon, saved for the nation in 1972, and Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks in 2004.
The later rooms hold Turner's The Fighting Temeraire, Van Gogh's Sunflowers, Cézanne's Bathers, Monet's The Water-Lily Pond and Renoir's The Umbrellas. The Sunflowers has had its own troubles, targeted twice by climate protesters throwing soup, though the glazing did its job both times.
The building
After Wilkins, the gallery grew piecemeal — the Barry Rooms in 1876, a northern extension in 1975 — until the Sainsbury Wing. The plan that preceded it caused one of the great architectural rows of the century, when the then Prince of Wales described the proposed design in 1984 as a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved friend. That scheme died. What was built instead, by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown and opened in 1991, was postmodern, deferential to Wilkins and disliked by plenty of people at the time.
The bicentenary
The gallery marked its two hundredth birthday in 2024 with a year-long programme under the name NG200. Twelve paintings, among them Botticelli's Venus and Mars and Monet's The Water-Lily Pond, travelled to twelve partner venues around the country as National Treasures, several of them leaving Trafalgar Square for the first time in decades. An accompanying Art Road Trip took mobile studios to communities with little access to the arts.
The building programme that went with it, NG200: Welcome, cost £85 million. The Sainsbury Wing closed in February 2023 and reopened on 10 May 2025, reworked by Selldorf Architects with the heritage practice Purcell: a double-height foyer, clear glazing where the windows had been darkened, and a small square carved out of the gallery's own footprint at the entrance. It is now the main way in.
Digging for the tunnel that links the wing to the Wilkins building turned up something unexpected. Archaeologists found a hearth, postholes, pits and ditches from Lundenwic, the Saxon trading settlement along the Strand, with the hearth carbon-dated to between 659 and 774. The finds pushed the known western edge of Saxon London further out than anyone had established before.
The rehang
The reopening came with the first complete rehang of the collection since 1991, unveiled the same day. Overseen by Christine Riding, it puts nearly forty per cent of the collection on show — a far higher proportion than most galleries of this rank manage — and keeps a broadly chronological path while allowing rooms built around themes and unexpected pairings across centuries.
Visitor numbers are recovering rather than recovered. The gallery drew 4.2 million people in 2025, up from 3.2 million the year before, against six million in 2019.
Next door
The National Portrait Gallery stands immediately behind, and although the two are often taken for one institution, it is entirely separate, with its own founding in 1856 and its own trustees. Its collection runs from the Tudors to living sitters, and the building reopened in 2023 after a three-year refurbishment of its own.
Both are free, with charges only for special exhibitions. Charing Cross is the nearest Underground and mainline station; Leicester Square and Embankment are much the same distance on foot.
Reaching the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery is easy via train or the London Underground i.e. 'the tube' or subway. Exit at Charing Cross station.