24 artworks to see in London, from famous paintings to surprising objects

01 /24

The Arnolfini Portrait

Jan van Eyck · 1434

The tiny convex mirror contains two extra figures standing in the doorway. It lets you look back into the room from the opposite direction.

Two people stand in a room dense with possessions, yet the smallest object opens the space most dramatically. The convex mirror on the back wall reflects two additional figures in the doorway. Van Eyck’s portrait turns polished surfaces, fur, fabric and household objects into things you want to inspect almost one by one. The couple are probably Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife, but the painting’s purpose remains debated. That matters because the familiar image has accumulated many confident explanations. Begin with what the paint actually shows: a room, a meeting, and a mirror that lets you look back from the opposite side.

02 /24

The Ambassadors

Hans Holbein the Younger · 1533

Stand near the right edge and look across the picture: the strange smear along the floor resolves into a skull.

A few rooms into an art museum, looking can start to feel automatic. Holbein makes you change position. The pale smear along the floor resolves into a skull when viewed obliquely from the right. Above it, two Frenchmen stand among globes, instruments and books, the impressive equipment of worldly knowledge. Other disruptions are smaller: a broken lute string suggests discord, and a crucifix appears at the edge of the curtain. Set this beside Van Eyck’s mirror in your mind. Both paintings reward patient scrutiny, but Holbein builds an unsettling reminder of death into the act of seeing correctly.

03 /24

The Virgin of the Rocks

Leonardo da Vinci · About 1491/2–1499 and 1506–1508

London has Leonardo’s second version of this mysterious grotto scene.

Leonardo’s four figures seem to emerge slowly from a grotto. Mary shelters the infant John the Baptist; Christ blesses him; an angel completes the group, while hands and glances draw the separate figures together. This is the second version of a composition commissioned for an altarpiece in Milan. The earlier painting is at the Louvre. The London version rewards allowing your eyes to settle into its dark areas: pools, distant light and strange formations of rock begin to separate. After the clearly inventoried possessions in Holbein and Van Eyck, Leonardo’s landscape feels difficult to measure, as though it extends well beyond the scene we can see.

04 /24

The Wilton Diptych

Unknown English or French artist · About 1395–1399

The angels wear Richard II’s white-stag badge. This little heavenly court is also a very personal royal portrait.

This little folding altarpiece was made for Richard II’s private devotion, but its vision of heaven is also a vision of his own kingship. Three saints present him to Mary and the Christ Child. The blue-robed angels wear the king’s white-hart badge, bringing his personal emblem into the heavenly company. Worked gold, fine detail and brilliant colour make the object feel precious before its message becomes clear. It is one of the rare English panel paintings to survive from the Middle Ages. The scale is intimate, yet the claim being made about royal authority is enormous.

05 /24

The Madonna of the Pinks

Raphael · About 1506–1507

Long dismissed as a copy, this tiny painting was recognised as Raphael’s own work in 1991, then supported by technical examination.

Raphael’s mother and child exchange carnations in a bedchamber, their attention concentrated on each other and the flowers. The image is little larger than a prayer book and may once have been held for contemplation. Its recent history brings another kind of close attention: long treated as a copy, it was recognised as Raphael’s own painting in 1991. Technical examination supported the attribution, revealing exploratory drawing and changes beneath the surface. After the Wilton Diptych’s royal theology, this small panel makes devotion look warmly domestic. Even the tiny chip in the stone windowsill helps the room feel inhabited.

06 /24

The Rokeby Venus

Diego Velázquez · 1647–1651

Venus turns away from us, yet Cupid’s mirror offers a blurred glimpse of her face. Velázquez keeps the encounter teasingly incomplete.

Venus turns away, leaving Cupid’s mirror to offer a softened glimpse of her face. The painting’s strongest lines belong to her back and to the waves of grey satin and white linen beneath it. This is Velázquez’s only surviving female nude, but its unceremonious setting can make the goddess seem surprisingly close. The familiar nickname comes from Rokeby Park in County Durham, where it hung in the nineteenth century. With Holbein’s skull and Van Eyck’s convex glass elsewhere in the gallery, it forms another encounter in which a picture makes us conscious of what a reflection reveals and withholds.

07 /24

Self Portrait in a Straw Hat

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun · 1782

The palette and brushes announce her profession, while the pose borrows from a Rubens portrait she admired.

Vigée Le Brun holds a palette and brushes while flowers and a feather decorate her hat. The portrait places her profession in plain sight without surrendering the elegance of a society portrait. She was responding to a Rubens painting she had seen in Antwerp, particularly its handling of light and shadow; this is her own version of an earlier self-portrait. Under the broad brim, reflected light keeps her face open even where direct sunlight is blocked. After so many portraits commissioned to declare a sitter’s position, it is refreshing to meet an artist arranging the terms of her own appearance.

08 /24

Whistlejacket

George Stubbs · About 1762

No rider, saddle or landscape competes with the horse. At nearly three metres high, this is a portrait on a ruler’s scale.

There is no rider to explain why this horse deserves such a large canvas. Whistlejacket takes the space for himself, rearing against a bare background with every muscle, vein and turn of the head sharply observed. Stubbs painted the racehorse for its owner, the Marquess of Rockingham, on a scale usually associated with mounted rulers. The emptiness behind it prompted stories of an unfinished painting or a missing rider, but there is no convincing evidence for those explanations. A living animal has been given the full force of a grand portrait. The still canvas somehow keeps the next movement possible.

09 /24

The Fighting Temeraire

J. M. W. Turner · 1839

Turner restored the ship’s already-removed masts in paint and rearranged the sunset. This farewell is carefully staged.

The tug is small, dark and busy; the old warship is pale enough to seem ghostly. Turner makes the Temeraire’s final journey to the breakers a meeting between steam and sail, with a blazing sunset supplying the farewell. The ship had fought at Trafalgar, but the painting is no literal record of its 1838 journey. Its masts had already been removed, and the sunset does not fit the direction of travel. Turner restores and rearranges what he needs. The result is a useful reminder, beside Constable’s apparently immediate landscapes, that a convincing scene can be built out of deliberate invention.

10 /24

The Hay Wain

John Constable · 1821

This apparently spontaneous view of Suffolk was painted in Constable’s London studio, using studies made in the landscape.

Constable knew this stretch of the River Stour from childhood, but painted the finished picture in his London studio. Studies and memory helped him assemble the cottage, water, wagon and far meadow into a view that seems effortlessly present. The wagon is empty, despite the familiar title; when first exhibited, the picture was called Landscape: Noon. It later won a gold medal in Paris. A rural scene associated so strongly with England thus had an important life abroad. After Turner’s blazing sky, its quieter reflections and summer clouds offer a different way of making weather and place carry feeling.

11 /24

Bathers at Asnières

Georges Seurat · 1884

Beyond the sunlit bathers, factory chimneys identify a working suburb. Seurat gives an ordinary afternoon the stillness of a monument.

The bathers appear almost sculptural in the afternoon heat, while factory chimneys mark the industrial world behind them. Seurat was not yet twenty-five when he made this first major painting of people resting beside the Seine. The official Salon rejected it. From a distance, the figures and riverbank settle into a strikingly ordered arrangement; up close, the worked surface becomes more varied than the familiar label ‘Pointillism’ suggests. Following Turner and Constable, the subject also shifts: the outskirts of a modern city become the setting for a painting with the stillness and scale of something much more ceremonial.

12 /24

Sunflowers

Vincent van Gogh · 1888

Fresh blooms and drooping heads share the same vase. Van Gogh makes a whole cycle of life out of shades of yellow.

Van Gogh painted sunflowers in Arles while preparing the Yellow House for Gauguin’s arrival. He wanted pictures that could make a room welcoming, and explored how far yellow could carry the whole composition. The bouquet holds fresh blooms alongside heavy, fading heads; thick paint gives the flowers a physical presence that reproductions can flatten. Behind the apparent abundance is a firm structure of vase, tabletop and background. If the painting is the reason for your trip, check its display status first. It is included here for its importance to London’s collection, with the current practical exception stated above.

Currently off display. Check the National Gallery before planning a visit around this painting.

13 /24

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey

Paul Delaroche · 1833

Damaged in the 1928 Thames flood and put into storage, this vast painting returned to public view after its rediscovery decades later.

The blindfolded Lady Jane Grey reaches for the execution block while a man guides her hand. Delaroche turns the fall of the teenage queen into a scene of almost theatrical suspense, concentrating light on her white dress and vulnerability. The painting itself later came close to disappearing from public view. Damaged in the 1928 flood at the Tate, it was stored away and rediscovered decades later, returning to display in the 1970s. That afterlife is an unexpected companion to the history on the canvas: an enormous and once celebrated picture can still be lost to attention.

14 /24

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

Édouard Manet · 1882

Look at the top-left corner for a trapeze artist’s green boots, suspended above the crowd.

A pair of green boots hangs in the top-left corner. They belong to a trapeze artist performing above the crowd, one of the small clues that reconstructs the Folies-Bergère around its barmaid. Manet made studies at the venue, then had Suzon pose in his studio for this, his last major painting. The mirror behind her shifts her reflection and a customer to the right in a way that resists a comfortable reading of the space. London's other famous painted mirrors prepare you to enjoy the puzzle, but her expression brings the encounter back to a person at work amid the entertainment.

15 /24

Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear

Vincent van Gogh · 1889

The bandage appears on the right because Van Gogh painted his reflection. The injured ear was his left.

An easel and a Japanese print share the studio with Van Gogh. Both matter in a portrait painted soon after he left hospital in Arles in January 1889: the room contains the means of working and an art he deeply admired. The bandage appears on the right because he painted his reflection; the injured ear was his left. A heavy coat and fur cap enclose the concentrated face, while strong blocks of colour hold the image together. Alongside Manet’s crowded bar, this is an exceptionally private encounter, and a reminder to see the work around the famous biographical detail.

16 /24

The Laughing Cavalier

Frans Hals · 1624

He is not actually laughing, and no one has proved he was a cavalier. The famous title arrived centuries after the portrait.

The title promises a laugh and a cavalier, but neither description is secure. Hals’s sitter is an unidentified twenty-six-year-old, and the familiar name was invented long after the portrait was painted. What is unmistakable is his confidence. Embroidered sleeves, lace and a curled moustache make an elaborate presentation of the self, while the black sash shows how much Hals could do with apparent simplicity. The expression is closer to a knowing half-smile than open laughter. In a guide filled with names we recognise, this anonymous young man is an excellent example of how vividly a person can survive without a settled biography.

17 /24

The Swing

Jean-Honoré Fragonard · About 1767–1768

A slipper flies through the air while a stone Cupid raises a finger to his lips. Even the garden seems in on the secret.

Fragonard makes the whole garden participate in a secret. An older man pulls the swing while a young woman rises through the greenery and a concealed admirer watches from the bushes. A slipper flies off; a stone Cupid asks for silence. The pink dress and frothy vegetation can initially make the scene feel loose and effortless, but ropes, branches and gestures arrange the action with great precision. After Hals’s carefully presented sitter, the Wallace offers a different kind of performance: a world in which flirtation has been staged down to the last airborne accessory.

18 /24

Ophelia

John Everett Millais · 1851–1852

Millais painted the riverbank outdoors, then had Elizabeth Siddal pose in a studio bath for Ophelia herself.

Millais studied the riverbank beside the Hogsmill in Surrey before bringing the figure into the picture in his studio. Elizabeth Siddal posed in a bath for Shakespeare’s Ophelia, whose open hands and floating body sit among an extraordinary density of plants. Several flowers carry meanings connected to the story, including innocence and death. Yet the contrast is legible before any symbolism is explained: the bank is thick with life, while the figure is drifting beyond it. At Tate Britain, this exacting attention to nature leads into other paintings where a beautiful setting carries a much less comfortable story.

19 /24

The Lady of Shalott

John William Waterhouse · 1888

Two candles have gone out and one still burns. Waterhouse turns a small boat into a quiet countdown.

Two candles have gone out; a third still burns. Waterhouse puts that small countdown at the front of the boat carrying Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott towards Camelot. After looking directly at Lancelot, in defiance of the condition under which she lived, she has left her tower under a curse. The tapestry she wove trails over the side as she lets go of the mooring chain. Like Ophelia, the painting brings a literary tragedy into a carefully described natural setting. Here the autumn colours, dark water and open mouth seem to hold the interval between the beginning of a song and its disappearance.

20 /24

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose

John Singer Sargent · 1885–1886

Sargent worked outdoors in the brief evening window when the lantern glow and fading daylight balanced just right.

The lanterns glow, but daylight has not quite gone. That balance gave Sargent only a short window each evening to work outdoors on his two young models, Dolly and Polly Barnard. He painted the scene over two summers in the Cotswolds, with tall flowers enclosing the children and their paper lights. The title comes from a popular song. After the stories of Ophelia and the Lady of Shalott, this garden offers no comparable catastrophe. Its suspense belongs to time and observation: the faces warm in the lantern light while the surrounding flowers remain in the cooling air of dusk.

21 /24

The Cholmondeley Ladies

Unknown artist, Britain · About 1600

Two women sit side by side, each holding a swaddled baby.

At first the women seem almost identical. Look more closely at their eyes, jewellery and the babies’ clothing, and the portrait becomes a game of small differences. Its inscription links the sitters through the same dates of birth, marriage and childbirth.

The unknown painter arranged the pair with unusual symmetry. Even without knowing their names, the shared pose makes family resemblance and individual identity feel equally important.

A collection record does not guarantee that a work is currently on display.

22 /24

Tipu’s Tiger

Unknown makers, Mysore · About 1790

The tiger conceals a mechanical organ. Turning its handle made the European victim’s arm move and produced groans and animal sounds.

Turn a handle and this wooden tiger once supplied a soundtrack to its attack: a hidden organ produced sounds while the European figure’s arm moved. Made for Tipu Sultan of Mysore, the object brings courtly craftsmanship and political hostility into the same ingenious machine. The tiger was one of Tipu’s favoured emblems. British East India Company troops seized this one after capturing his capital in 1799; it eventually entered the V&A. Its route to London belongs beside its mechanism in any account of the object. The fascination of the construction does not make that history disappear.

Its South Asia gallery is closed for refurbishment until spring 2028; check the V&A for any alternative display before visiting.

23 /24

The Miraculous Draught of Fishes

Raphael and workshop · About 1515–1516

This monumental image is painted on paper. It was a full-size working design for a tapestry destined for the Sistine Chapel.

The boats are full, Peter kneels before Christ and great birds occupy the foreground. Raphael designed the scene for a tapestry intended for Pope Leo X’s Sistine Chapel, but the object at the V&A is painted paper: the full-size model, or cartoon, used by the weavers. Seven of the original ten cartoons survive. Cut into strips for handling and later reassembled, they eventually came on loan from the Royal Collection. After London’s smaller easel paintings, their scale is a surprise in itself. A working design can command a room as completely as the finished object it was made to guide.

24 /24

The Portland Vase

Unknown Roman glassmakers · About 1–25 CE

The pale figures were carved through a white layer to reveal dark-blue glass beneath. This is glassmaking with the precision of gemstone carving.

White figures stand against deep blue, carved through one layer of glass to reveal another. The Portland Vase brings the precision of gemstone cutting to a material that seems almost too fragile for it. The exact meaning of its scenes is still debated, while its modern history is painfully definite: a visitor smashed it in 1845. Restorations, including major work in 1989, returned the fragments to the form now in the British Museum. It makes a fitting final object in this selection. Looking at art is also looking at what has been moved, misunderstood, damaged, repaired and somehow kept.