National Gallery

The National Gallery exists because of an embarrassment. In 1824, Parliament agreed to buy 38 paintings from the estate of the banker John Julius Angerstein so that Britain would finally have a national collection worth the name, rather than watching visitors travel to Paris, Madrid or Vienna to see one. Those first canvases were shown in Angerstein's own townhouse on Pall Mall until a purpose-built home was ready, and in 1838 the collection moved into William Wilkins' neoclassical building on the newly laid-out Trafalgar Square, where it has stood ever since.

What began as three dozen paintings has grown into a collection of more than 2,300 works, and remarkably, entry has stayed free the entire time — a policy every government since 1824 has kept in place. The most significant addition to the building came in 1991, when the Sainsbury Wing opened next door: a postmodern extension by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, built specifically to house the gallery's earliest paintings, glowing altarpieces by Van Eyck and Botticelli from the very start of the Renaissance.

Leonardo da Vinci painted two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks, and the National Gallery owns one of them — the other hangs in the Louvre, making London one of only two places on Earth to see this composition in the original. Elsewhere in the collection, an entire room is given over to J.M.W. Turner's late seascapes, their skies and water dissolving into pure light and colour decades before Impressionism existed as a movement.

Van Gogh painted five versions of his Sunflowers, and the one in London — canary yellow flowers against a yellow background — is arguably the most reproduced of the set. He made it in Arles in 1888 to decorate the room where he hoped Paul Gauguin would stay, and it has since become the single most photographed painting in the gallery, endlessly reproduced on posters, mugs and tote bags in the gift shop below.

Entry to the permanent collection is free, and unlike the Louvre or the British Museum, the National Gallery fits comfortably into a single afternoon without leaving you exhausted or having to skip entire wings. It opens daily from 10:00, with last entry allowed right up to closing, and on Fridays it stays open until 21:00 — a good option for a quieter, atmospheric evening visit away from the daytime tour groups.

The gallery sits directly on Trafalgar Square, a short walk from Charing Cross station and served by several tube lines, so it's easy to combine with a stroll around the square itself or nearby Leicester Square and Covent Garden. Free gallery maps are available at the entrance, and picking two or three rooms to focus on tends to be more rewarding than trying to see everything in one visit.