This article is part of the FT Globetrotter's guide to London
The National Gallery in London, although smaller than some European museums, has a very extensive and pleasingly diverse collection, including all the major artistic names up to the 20th century, from Leonardo to Picasso. Some famous works – “The Arnolfini Marriage”, “The Fighting Temeraire”, “Sunflowers” – are intentional paintings; Others who are just as beautiful and interesting are often overlooked. Upon personal selection, I excluded the 36 landmarks identified by the exhibition, assuming that first-time visitors would initially seek them out. My selections include some of the greatest paintings ever painted, and lesser-known paintings that captivate me. I've roughly plotted a chronological route, but no two visitors really take the same route; The fun is to lose yourself in the exhibition's maze of fascinating possibilities.
On the ground floor, the early Italian galleries are a less-visited glory. Even at peak times you'll find yourself alone here, transported past gleaming gilded devotional panels to the candlelit 14th century Florentine interior. Andrea di Bonato's unique painting “The Virgin and Child with Ten Saints” specifically recalls the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, and was painted as a visual map of it. Standing high in the central arch, Mary and Jesus each in their jeweled columned alcoves, unfolding in architectural order, are the ten saints to whom a chapel is dedicated in the vast church, all meticulously individual.
Room 12, the picture gallery that opens the Old Masters' rooms, houses many stunning works, chief among them Raphael's “Pope Julius II,” a foundational image of power in European art. There is a wonderful feeling in being in the presence of the wily old Pope, known as the “Warrior Pope.” It's all powerful and festive – the deep, vibrant colors, the foreground pose, the massive curtain, the chunky rings – and yet the painting is also intimate; We feel the fragility of Julius. After his death, according to Vasari, “the picture was so vivid and real that it frightened everyone.”
Still in room 12 is Moretto da Brescia's “Portrait of a Young Man,” the kind of youth of all times: the charmingly weak intellectual, lost in thought, who wears his heart, if not on his sleeve, then on his hat, with its badge written: “Ah, “I'm so desperate.” This is Fortunato Martinengo, who founded the Skeptics Academy in Brescia, to discuss humanist ideas. There is no doubt about his wealth: the luxurious snow fur lining his dress rivals the luxurious furs in Holbein's famous painting “The Ambassadors”, which hangs on the same wall.
Britain has only one important Renaissance painting from Spain, Bartolomé Bermejo's Saint Michael Conquering the Devil (Room 15), and its dynamism and flamboyant Manichaean theatricality demonstrate how strange Spanish art has always been. The saint's graceful body bends in one direction, his crimson cloak billows in the other, his multicolored wings soar, the golden breastplate reflects minute details of Jerusalem, and the pale oval face is at once otherworldly and violent. By attacking Michael's feet, the blood-eyed demon/dragon/fish adds a touch of comedy to this intense vision of justice and protection.
The Venetian Room 29, with its brilliant barrel-vaulted ceiling, is the beating heart of the National Museum and contains its most passionate paintings, such as Titian's “Diana and Actaeon” and “Diana and Callisto,” bound together by a luminous landscape shared by a blasting stream. running between them. Through their pictorial eloquence, their unification of form and narrative – the sense of everything changing and dissolving in faint brushstrokes as in the harsh story of passion, fate and innocence punished – these images opened up a new secular expression. Here also, in Titian's late semi-abstract style, is a tragic sequel, “The Death of Actaeon.”
Both Titian and Rembrandt are exceptionally represented in the National Gallery. Among the major religious dramas, the informal, tender and evocative drama The Portrait of Hendrik Stoffels (Room 22) dazzles. Rembrandt's mistress was half-dressed, the soft flesh of her breasts and neck enhanced by her jewellery, a sliver of a silk shirt and loosely painted fur wraps. With huge black eyes and an incomparable expression between uncertainty and familiarity, spontaneity and seriousness, she looks frankly at the artist – and at us.
The great classical artist Poussin, a contemporary of Rembrandt, seems even more distant today. “Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake” (Room 31), although darkened in colours, is a poetic scene through which we follow a winding series of shocked looks. A man sees a corpse entangled with a fat snake, and flees in terror; Disturbed, the washerwoman raises her arms at the sight of him, but does not see the body; The hunter only sees the frightened woman. Drama is the penetrating awareness of death hidden in the beauty of nature.
Will the terrified parrot gasping for air live or die? How we deal with the possibility of his death is at the heart of Joseph Wright's eerily compelling book “Experiment on a Bird at an Air Pump” (Room 34). There are a lot of contradictions driving this candlelit scene: pools of light and deep darkness, the child who can't bear to watch and the dispassionately curious adults, and the central character's personality as part romantic wizard, part scientific pioneer. Wright, the first painter of the Industrial Revolution, seems to warn of the dangers of an emotionally detached scientific society in the future.
The paintings in the famous Room 41 range from early Impressionism to Monet's 20th-century “Water Lilies.” Monet depicted water in all its forms, and loved to paint snow and how light played on its surface. In “The Snow Scene at Argenteuil,” he conjures sensations of sharp cold air, muffled sounds, and heavy snow crunching underfoot, enveloping us in the atmosphere of a winter afternoon in a Parisian suburb as the sun, still casting a rosy glow, begins to fade. Fog covers the buildings.
Recently joining the modernists of Room 43 – Seurat, Cézanne, Picasso – is Ferdinand Hodler’s “Caen Valley with the Blümlisalp Mass”. Hodler, who paints the Bernese Alps near his home, rejects traditional Swiss photography in favor of a pared-down geometric structure and pleasingly compact space. Displayed alongside Cézanne's 'In the Bibémus Quarry', Hodler's immersive views, crystalline colors and decorative patterns have a character of their own: a stunning new landscape acquired in 2022 – fascinating evidence that the National Gallery continues to grow and change.
What is your favorite painting or room in the National Gallery in London? Tell us in the comments below. And follow the FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter
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