My Top 10: Jackie Wullschläger’s guide to London’s National Gallery

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.

On the ground floor, the early Italian galleries are an undervisited glory. Even at peak times you find yourself alone here, transported by gleaming devotional gold-ground paintings to a 14th-century Florentine candlelit interior. Andrea di Boniauto’s unique “The Virgin and Child with Ten Saints” evokes precisely Florence’s Church of Santa Maria Novella, and was 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. 

Room 12, the portrait gallery opening the Old Master rooms, boasts many stunners, led by Raphael’s “Pope Julius II”, the foundational portrait of power in European art. There’s a terrific sense of being in the presence of the wily old pontiff, known as 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 Vasari, the portrait “was so lifelike and true it frightened everyone”. 

Still in Room 12, Moretto da Brescia’s “Portrait of a Young Man” is a 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” on the same wall. 

Britain has only one important Renaissance painting from Spain, Bartolmé Bermejo’s “St Michael Triumphs over the Devil” (Room 15), and its dynamism and glowing, Manichean theatricality demonstrate how brilliantly weird Spanish art has always been. 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.

The Venetian Room 29, with its flamboyant barrel vault roof, is the National Gallery’s beating heart and contains its most rapturous paintings, Titian’s “Diana and Actaeon” and “Diana and Callisto”, the pair 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 and innocence punished — these pictures opened up a new secular expressiveness. Also here, in Titian’s near-abstract late style, is their tragic sequel, “The Death of Actaeon”.

Titian and Rembrandt are both exceptionally represented at the National Gallery. Among grand religious dramas, the informal, tender, subtly eroticised “Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels” (Room 22) 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.

Cool classicist Poussin, Rembrandt’s contemporary, feels far more distant today. “Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake” (Room 31), though its colours have darkened, is an idyllic landscape through which we trace a zigzag of shocked gazes. 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.

Will the panicking cockatoo gasping for air live or die? How we engage with the prospect of its death is the core of Joseph Wright’s eerily compelling “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” (Room 34). So many contrasts animate this candlelit scene: 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.

Paintings in the ever-popular Room 41 range from early Impressionism to Monet’s 20th-century “Water-Lilies”. Monet depicted water in every form, and loved painting snow and how light plays on its surface. In “Snow Scene in Argenteuil”, 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.

Recently joining Room 43’s modernisers — Seurat, Cezanne, Picasso — is Ferdinand Hodler’s “The Kien Valley with the Bluemlisalp Massif”. Hodler, painting the Bernese Alps near his home, rejects traditional Swiss picturesque in favour of pared-down geometric structure and exhilaratingly compressed space. Displayed alongside Cezanne’s “In the Bibémus Quarry”, Hodler’s plunging vistas, crystalline colour and decorative patterning hold their own: a fresh, dashing landscape, acquired in 2022 — 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

Cities with the FT

FT Globetrotter, our insider guides to some of the world’s greatest cities, offers expert advice on eating and drinking, exercise, art and culture — and much more

Find us in London, Tokyo, New York, Paris, Rome, Frankfurt, Singapore, Hong Kong, Miami, Toronto, Madrid, Melbourne, Copenhagen, Zurich, Milan and Vancouver