National Gallery

What it is

The National Gallery is Britain's national collection of European painting, standing on the north side of Trafalgar Square and free to enter. It was established in 1824 around 38 paintings bought from the collection of the banker John Julius Angerstein, and it has grown into more than 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-thirteenth century to 1900. William Wilkins designed the building that opened to the public on Trafalgar Square in 1838. The National Gallery is therefore not an encyclopaedic museum of everything and not a modern art gallery: it is one continuous 650-year argument about European painting, hung in date order, from gold-ground altarpieces through Leonardo, Titian, Raphael and Velázquez to Turner and the Impressionists. Its founding purpose was set out by a Parliamentary Commission in 1857 in a sentence the gallery still quotes: the existence of the pictures is not the end purpose of the collection, but the means only to give the people an ennobling enjoyment. That is why entry has never been charged, and why the collection sits on a public square rather than in a park.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What's inside

The collection is hung chronologically, and the shape of a visit follows the shape of the building. The Sainsbury Wing, completed in 1991 to a postmodernist design by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, holds the earliest paintings, and it is also the gallery's main entrance, so a visitor who walks straight in and keeps going moves forward through time rather than doubling back. Beyond it the Wilkins building carries the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries through to 1900, the cut-off date for the collection. The named artists a first-time visitor comes for — Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Raphael, Velázquez and Turner — are distributed across those rooms rather than gathered into a highlights gallery, which is the single most useful thing to know before starting. The gallery announced a £375 million expansion in September 2025, Project Domani, with a new wing designed by Kengo Kuma and Associates due to open in the early 2030s and intended to let the gallery collect work made after 1900.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

How long to spend

Allow two hours at the National Gallery, the figure this guide records. Two hours is enough to walk the chronological line from the Sainsbury Wing through to the nineteenth-century rooms at an unhurried pace, stopping properly at perhaps a dozen paintings. A visitor with a short list — a Leonardo, a Velázquez, a room of Turners — can be in and out in 45 minutes, because entry is free and there is no ticket to justify. Anyone intending to see the collection thoroughly rather than selectively should treat it as two separate visits of two hours rather than one of four; free admission makes returning the cheaper strategy, and attention fails long before the rooms run out.

Checked 2026-08-26

Season and crowds

The National Gallery is open daily from 10am to 7pm, with Friday opening until 9pm, and it is closed on 24, 25 and 26 December and on 1 January. The late Friday is the most useful fact on the page for anyone planning around a working day: it is the only evening in the week when the collection can be seen after dinner rather than instead of it, and the rooms after 6pm are markedly emptier than the same rooms at midday. The gallery also warns that vital building work and improvements are under way in a few rooms, that some rooms will be closed while it is carried out, and that some paintings will be moved to a safer place to protect them, so a visit planned around one specific painting should be checked against the gallery's site first.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Tickets

General admission to the National Gallery is free, and donations are welcome. There is a charge for some exhibitions. The gallery offers a free ticket that can be booked in advance for fast-track entry and to receive key information and updates before a visit, and it states that walk-up entry is also available, so a booking is a convenience rather than a requirement. Exhibition tickets include free general admission, and members enjoy unlimited free access to all exhibitions. Free self-guided group visits can be booked. The practical reading of all this: no visitor needs to pay anything to see the 2,300 paintings of the permanent collection, and the only decision is whether to book a free slot to skip the door queue.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Getting there

The address is Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN, and entry is via the Sainsbury Wing. The gallery states that its main entrance for everyone is the Sainsbury Wing, which faces onto Trafalgar Square at the corner of Pall Mall and Whitcomb Street — the west end of the frontage, not the grand portico and steps in the middle that most first-time visitors head for. Walking to the wrong door and back along the front of the building is the standard opening mistake of a National Gallery visit, and it costs several minutes on a cold day. Members have a separate priority entry. Trafalgar Square itself is the arrival point on foot from Whitehall, the Strand and The Mall through Admiralty Arch.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What to watch out for

Security shapes the entrance experience. The gallery urges all visitors to bring minimal items with them, including no large bags, and states that all doors into the gallery have walk-through metal detectors where bags and rucksacks are inspected. The cloakroom costs £3 per item, free for members, and accepts bags up to 56 x 25 x 45 centimetres; wheeled luggage, including cabin bags, and suitcases are not allowed at all, which rules out a visit between a hotel checkout and a train. Baby buggies are welcome. The second thing to watch for is the building work: the gallery says some rooms will be closed and some paintings moved to a safer place while improvements are carried out, so the painting a visitor has travelled for may not be on the wall. The third is simply the scale of the free crowd on a wet weekend afternoon, when the central rooms fill and the Friday evening becomes the better plan.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Photography

The gallery's own instruction is generous and short: feel free to take photographs for personal, non-commercial use, unless a sign says otherwise. Loan exhibitions are where those signs appear, because the lenders rather than the gallery set the terms. In practice the rooms are lit for paintings rather than for cameras, and the varnish on an old master returns a hard specular highlight straight back at a flash, so the pictures that work are the ones taken at an angle to the surface and without added light. The Sainsbury Wing's grey stone staircase and the long enfilade of arched doorways through the Wilkins rooms photograph better than any single canvas, and the view out of the gallery's frontage across Trafalgar Square to Nelson's Column and Whitehall is the shot most visitors forget to turn around for.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Where it is

• 40 min

  2 min walk · City of Westminster

  Trafalgar Square

  • Must see
  • Historic monument
• 2 hours

  3 min walk · City of Westminster

  Odeon Panton Street

  • Entertainment venue
• 1 hour

  6 min walk · London Borough of Camden

  St Martin's Theatre

  • Art and culture venue

External links

• Official site
• View on Wikidata