Art to see in London: the National Gallery, Tate and the British Museum

The most famous art to see in London is at the National Gallery, with van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, Holbein's The Ambassadors, Turner's The Fighting Temeraire and van Gogh's Sunflowers. Tate Britain has Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Modern the 20th century and the present day, the British Museum antiquity and the art of Asia and the Victoria and Albert Museum the decorative arts and design. The Wallace Collection has Fragonard's The Swing. The national museums have free admission to their collections.

Facts

The National Gallery: the Old Masters

The National Gallery in Trafalgar Square was founded in 1824 and has one of the world's finest collections of European painting from the 13th century to 1900. The extension, the Sainsbury Wing, built in 1991, was designed for the earliest paintings. The collection includes van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait of 1434, with its mirror and the signature Jan van Eyck was here. Holbein's The Ambassadors of 1533 also hangs here, with its distorted skull, which can be seen correctly only if you stand at an angle to one side. Read the guides to The Arnolfini Portrait and The Ambassadors before you go.

Among the later works are Turner's The Fighting Temeraire of 1839, an old warship being towed to the breaker's yard at sunset, and Constable's The Hay Wain. Van Gogh's Sunflowers of 1888, painted to decorate Gauguin's room in Arles, is one of the museum's most visited paintings.

Tate Britain and Tate Modern

Tate Britain on the Thames at Millbank shows British art from the 16th century to the present day. Turner bequeathed his works to the nation, and a large part of them hang in a wing of their own, the Clore Gallery. Here too are the Pre-Raphaelites, including Millais's Ophelia, and the British artists of the 20th century.

Tate Modern opened in 2000 in a former power station at Bankside; the building appears in the architecture section as Tate Modern. In the vast Turbine Hall in 2010 the floor was filled with Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds, around a hundred million hand-painted porcelain seeds. The collection includes a replica of Duchamp's Fountain, the urinal of 1917 that asked who decides what is art.

The British Museum: antiquity and Asia

The British Museum in Bloomsbury, with its Neoclassical façade and the glass-roofed Great Court of 2000, is not an art museum in the narrow sense but has art from all over the world: the Parthenon sculptures, Egyptian and Assyrian reliefs, African bronzes and one of the largest collections of Chinese porcelain outside China.

There hangs the blue-and-white vase with dragons of around 1430, with a five-clawed dragon that was reserved for the emperor. In the 20th-century collection is Marianne Brandt's Teapot MT49 from the Bauhaus, built from basic geometric forms. In this way you can go from the Ming dynasty to Modernism in a single afternoon.

The Victoria and Albert Museum and the Wallace Collection

The V&A in South Kensington is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design: furniture, textiles, jewellery, ceramics, fashion and sculpture from all periods. Here is William Morris's pattern Strawberry Thief, thrushes stealing strawberries, printed with indigo. The museum also shows Raphael's great cartoons, designs for woven tapestries for the Sistine Chapel.

The Wallace Collection in a town palace at Manchester Square is a private collection that was bequeathed to the state in 1897. It is rich in French 18th-century art, and here hangs Fragonard's The Swing of 1767, the Rococo in a nutshell, together with Frans Hals's The Laughing Cavalier and French furniture of the 18th century.

More collections and buildings

The Courtauld Gallery in Somerset House has a small but very fine collection of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, including Manet's last great painting, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère of 1882, and van Gogh's self-portrait with bandaged ear. Read Monet or Manet? if you mix up the names.

London is also a city for seeing art outdoors. St Paul’s Cathedral, Christopher Wren's domed church completed in 1710, and Westminster Abbey have sculpture and funerary monuments from many centuries. The architecture section's guide Architecture in London shows about ten buildings on a map. More than fifty artists in the app have had London as a place of activity, from Holbein and van Dyck to Turner, Monet and Hockney; see them on the map and in the British thread.

How to plan your visit

The National Gallery, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, the British Museum, the V&A and the Wallace Collection have free admission to their collections; temporary exhibitions cost money. This means you can go in to see a single painting and come back another day. Choose a few works in advance, because the collections are too large for one visit.

A good day can begin at the National Gallery, continue along the Thames to Tate Britain and cross the Millennium Bridge to Tate Modern. If you want to compare with another city, read Art to see in Paris and Art to see in Florence.

Don't miss

Exercise

In which London museum does The Arnolfini Portrait hang?