National Gallery

Unlike the princely galleries of the continent, this museum began as a purchase by government rather than a royal inheritance. In 1824 the British government bought a group of thirty eight pictures from the heirs of the financier John Julius Angerstein, and the new gallery first showed them in his former townhouse on Pall Mall. The collection grew around that core until it needed a purpose built home, and the Wilkins building, raised on the north side of Trafalgar Square, has framed it ever since.

The scope is the Western tradition in painting from the thirteenth through the nineteenth century, with older masters sharing the rooms with the Impressionists who close the story. Depth rather than width has always been the principle: a smaller holding than many national museums, but one arranged so that most major movements in European painting are represented by their finest exponents.

The earliest treasures are also the most famous. Van Eyck signed and dated his double portrait of a couple in Bruges in 1434, a panel so early in the history of oil painting that only the Ghent Altarpiece rivals it in fame, and the gallery acquired it in 1842. Michelangelo is present with a rare panel, an unfinished burial of Christ. Holbein's two French envoys of 1533 hide a skull in their foreground, a smeared shape that only resolves when the panel is seen from the side.

The modern rooms carry the same weight. Turner bequeathed the Temeraire, a Trafalgar veteran towed to the breaker's yard by steam, and listeners to a radio programme later named it the nation's favourite picture. Wright's candlelit lecture on a bird in a vacuum pump has hung here since 1863, Seurat's riverside bathers were refused by the Salon jury before becoming a highlight of the walls, and Delaroche's scene of the nine days' queen returned from long storage in 1975 to become beloved all over again.