This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to London
London’s National Gallery, though smaller than some European museums, has a very broad and enjoyably diverse collection, featuring all of art’s major names until the 1900s, from Leonardo to Picasso. Some famous works — “The Arnolfini Marriage”, “The Fighting Temeraire”, “Sunflowers” — are destination paintings; others just as beautiful and interesting are often overlooked. In making a personal selection, I excluded the 36 highlights defined by the gallery, assuming first-time visitors will seek these initially. My choices include some of the greatest paintings ever made, and lesser-knowns that captivate me. I have mapped a roughly chronological route, but no two visitors really take the same path; the joy is to lose yourself in the gallery’s magnificent labyrinth of possibilities.
Andrea di Boniauto, ‘The Virgin and Child with Ten Saints’, 1365-70
Early Renaissance paintings are the glory of the Sainsbury Wing, designed as a modern reimagining of the ecclesiastical architecture for which most of these works were made. Boniauto’s 11 panels evoke precisely the church of Santa Maria Novella, and were painted as a visual map of it. Mary and Jesus stand high in the central arch and, each in their own colonnaded, jewel-studded alcoves, unfolding in architectural order, are the 10 saints to whom a chapel in the vast church is dedicated, all delicately individualised.
Bertolmé Bermejo, ‘St Michael Triumphs over the Devil’, 1468
The Sainsbury Wing’s gleaming new themed gallery “Gold” (room 64) stars Bermejo’s swooping angel, the only Spanish Renaissance painting in Britain. The saint’s lithe body curves in one direction, his crimson cloak billows in the other, multicoloured wings soar, the golden breastplate reflects a minutely detailed Jerusalem, the pale oval face is at once otherworldly and fierce. Attacking Michael’s feet, the bloody-eyed demon/dragon/fish brings a splash of comedy to this intense vision of justice and protection. Bermejo’s dynamism and glowing Manichean theatricality demonstrate how brilliantly weird Spanish art has always been.
Raphael, ‘Pope Julius II’, 1511-12
Centrepiece of gallery 2’s display devoted to “Power, Patronage and Politics” in the Renaissance, this is the foundational power portrait in European art. There’s a terrific sense of being in the presence of the wily old pontiff, called the Warrior Pope. Everything is strong and ceremonial — vibrant deep colours, frontal pose, hefty curtain, chunky rings — yet the painting is intimate too, we feel Julius’s frailty. After his death, according to Giorgio Vasari, the portrait “was so lifelike and true it frightened everyone”.
Moretto da Brescia, ‘Portrait of a Young Man’, 1540-5
Among many stunners in the Renaissance portrait room 4 is Moretto’s youthful type for all times: the languid, charming intellectual, lost in thought, wearing his heart if not on his sleeve then on his hat, its badge reading “Ah I yearn so strongly”. This is Fortunato Martinengo, who founded Brescia’s “Accademia del Dubbiosi” — Academy of Doubters — to debate humanist ideas. Not in doubt is his wealth: the opulent snow leopard lining to his gown rivals the sumptuous fur in Holbein’s famous “The Ambassadors” in the same room.
Titian, Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, 1556-59
The new gallery dedicated to Titian (room 8), one of the rehang’s great gains, contains the most rapturous paintings in all the collection, the pair “Diana and Actaeon” and “Diana and Callisto”, connected by a shared luminous landscape with a bubbling stream running between them. By their painterly eloquence, uniting form and narrative — the sense of everything changing and dissolving in the flickering brushwork as it does in the cruel story of passion, fate, innocence punished — these pictures opened up a new secular expressiveness. Campaigning for their acquisition in 2009, Lucian Freud called them “simply the most beautiful pictures in the world”.
Poussin, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, 1648
Cool classicist Poussin can seem distant today, but “Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake” grips by the very restraint with which he invites us to trace a zigzag of shocked gazes across an idyllic scene. A man, seeing a dead body entwined with a fat snake, flees in horror; alarmed, a washerwoman throws up her arms on sight of him, but doesn’t see the corpse; a fisherman sees only the frightened woman. The drama is the piercing realisation of death lurking within nature’s beauty.
Rembrandt, ‘Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels’, 1654-6
Holding its own among the grand religious dramas in the Rembrandt gallery (room 22), this informal, tender, subtly eroticised portrait mesmerises. Rembrandt’s lover is half-dressed, the soft flesh of her breasts and neck heightened by her jewels, the sliver of a silk chemise, and the loosely hanging, loosely painted fur wrap. With huge black eyes and an incomparable expression between uncertainty and familiarity, spontaneity and seriousness, she looks frankly at the artist — and at us.
Joseph Wright, ‘An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump’, 1768
Will the panicking cockatoo gasping for air live or die? How we engage with the prospect of its death is the subject of this eerily compelling candlelit scene (room 34), animated by so many contrasts: pools of light and deep darkness, the child who can’t bear to watch and the dispassionately curious adults, the central figure’s persona as part romantic magician, part scientific pioneer. Wright, the first painter of the Industrial Revolution, seems to warn of the dangers of an emotionally detached scientific society to come.
Monet, ‘Snow Scene in Argenteuil’, 1875
Gallery 46, dedicated to late-era Monet (his work between 1890-1917, including many Water Lilies) is an unmissable high of the rehang, but in the early impressionism room 41 the younger Monet’s paintings of water in every form — sea, river, steam, snow — are also a joy. Here he evokes sensations of sharp cold air, muffled sounds, thick snow crunching underfoot, enveloping us in the atmosphere of a winter afternoon in a Paris suburb as the sun, still casting a pinkish glow, begins to fade and mist cloaks the buildings.
Ferdinand Hodler, ‘The Kien Valley with the Bluemlisalp Massif’, 1902
Among gallery 44’s modernisers — Seurat, Cezanne, Picasso — is Hodler’s depiction of the Bernese Alps near his home, rejecting traditional Swiss picturesque in favour of pared down geometric structure and exhilaratingly compressed space. Hodler’s plunging vistas, crystalline colour and decorative patterning create a fresh, dashing landscape; acquired in 2022, it is marvellous proof that the National Gallery continues to grow and change.
What’s your favourite painting — or room — in London’s National Gallery? Tell us in the comments below. And follow FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter
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