London is teeming with things that define our artistic history — here's how you can visit them

Through the looking glass

Desborough mirror, British Museum

Found in Northamptonshire, the Desborough mirror is a high-quality example of the Celtic ‘mirror style’. One side of the circular bronze sheet would have been highly polished; the other is decorated with a complex array of patterns based on segments of circles created with a pair of compasses. The result is an elaborate design that was clearly executed with great care, each line being cut freehand into the metal a little more than 2,000 years ago. The Celts are believed to have been connected tribes who spanned the length of the Atlantic coast, from Portugal and Spain up into Ireland and mainland Britain. The British Museum houses many significant artefacts intricately decorated with anthropomorphic forms and swirling vegetal designs — confirmation that art was firmly embedded in the Celtic way of life.

On a wing and a prayer

Lindisfarne Gospels, British Library

On the remote island of Lindisfarne, off the Northumberland coast, Eadfrith began the long and arduous task of completing his illuminated manuscript in AD715. He was Bishop of Lindisfarne and had set his mind to creating a lavishly illustrated copy of the four gospels. At his death in 721, the Lindisfarne Gospels, as they are now known, were unfinished, but the completed pages are some of the most ornate and complex ever produced. Eadfrith wrote the text in Latin on 259 leaves of vellum. Prefacing each gospel are ‘carpet’ pages, dazzlingly intricate designs centred on Christian crosses. In borders and boxed-out sections, ribbonwork birds appear, their bodies elongated into convoluted knots, their beaked heads biting their own necks to form elegant arabesques. Originally, the Lindisfarne Gospels would have reposed on the altar of Lindisfarne church, but, following attacks by the Vikings at the end of the 8th century, they were safely evacuated and today can be seen in the British Library in London.

Checkmate

The Lewis Chessmen, split between the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland, and the British Museum

The Lewis chess pieces are tiny in stature — no more than 4in tall — but they command your attention. Carved from walrus ivory and sperm-whale tooth, they are richly detailed. Hefty kings and queens sit on their thrones, swords laid across passive laps. By comparison, the warders (rooks) are ready for battle — several bite their shields in anticipation, like ancient berserkers, who notoriously fought naked to intimidate their opponents. There are also clean-shaven bishops with tall croziers and knights in battle armour on stocky horses. By the time these pieces were made in 12th-century Trondheim, Norway, the expansion of Christianity had ensured that the bishop supplanted the earlier war elephant in the game. The chessmen were buried on Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, when the island was part of the Norwegian empire, and only found in the early 19th century.

Skull and bones

The Ambassadors, Hans Holbein the Younger, National Gallery

A perennial favourite at the National Gallery in London is Hans Holbein the Younger’s 1533 double portrait The Ambassadors. Jean de Dinteville and Bishop Georges de Selve were close friends and are shown standing on either side of a table loaded with scientific equipment and religious texts. The picture was painted in London the year in which Henry VIII broke free of the Catholic Church and married Anne Boleyn. The snapped string on the lute suggests harmonious discord and the mathematical treatise is open to the page on division, but the strangest addition is the slick of brown and cream paint across the floor — only when you squat down on the right side does it make sense, morphing into a large skull that hovers in front of the men. Despite appearances, it seems to suggest, these men will soon be dust. Only Christ — visible on a tiny silver crucifix top left behind the curtain — lives forever.

Don’t lose your head

Apotheosis of James I, Rubens, Banqueting House

Standing inside Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House will give you vertigo. The ceiling is 55ft high and is home to nine paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, whose dizzying feats of trompe l’oeil have you ascending to Heaven together with James I. Today, you can book a tour to see them, but, when Rubens’s paintings were first installed in 1636, this room would have been used for the highest diplomatic negotiations. The Banqueting House formed part of Whitehall Palace, the main residence of British kings and queens from 1530 until it was destroyed by fire in 1698. Only this building survived. Rubens was a diplomat, as well as an artist, and this commission was finalised after he arrived in London to broker a peace deal on behalf of the King of Spain. It was requested by Charles I to commemorate the reign of his father. Ironically, it was the last thing that Charles saw as he walked to the executioner’s block after losing the Civil War.

A brush with greatness

Self-portrait with her husband and son, Mary Beale, Museum of the Home

Today, Mary Beale’s self-portrait with her husband and son (1660) is on display at the Museum of the Home in London, but it would have originally hung in the artist’s four-storey townhouse off Fleet Street (and later in her Pall Mall studio and home in fashionable St James’s). In it, we see her husband and son forming a domestic circle through their interlocking hands, with Beale pointing to herself and looking directly at us — if it is a painting you are after, she infers, you should be in no doubt that you should be speaking to the woman of the house. Beale supported her husband, Charles, and sons Bartholomew and Charles Jnr through her studio practice, specialising in portraiture. Charles Snr was her studio manager, keeping the books and preparing canvases, and her sons started out as models, before graduating to becoming her assistants.

An Englishman’s home is his castle

Sir John Soane’s Museum

This Wunderkammer of a museum never ceases to fascinate. From the Egyptian sarcophagus of King Seti I in the Sepulchral Chamber to the concertinaed Picture Room that includes William Hogarth’s ‘A Rake’s Progress’ (about 1734) and Canaletto’s Riva degli Schiavoni (1735), it is packed with sculptures, prints, architectural models, books and curios. Sir John Soane was a neo-Classical architect who accumulated antiquities and works of art at such a rate that he had to buy the house next door (then a stable block behind and finally another neighbouring house) to accommodate it. After falling out with his son, he disinherited him, leaving the museum and its contents to the nation. It opened in 1837.

The greatest gift

Turner Bequest, Tate Britain

Joseph Mallord William Turner raced out of the blocks to join the Royal Academy Schools at 14 and become the youngest ever Academician at 26 (Constable had to wait until his fifties to be so rewarded). He roamed the British Isles and beyond, filling 300 sketchbooks with views that he shaped and honed into paintings in his London studio. Harnessing the Sublime and the Picturesque, he was deft in oil and watercolour, as well as at translating his landscapes into prints. The Turner Bequest remains the largest single donation of works by an artist to the nation. It was originally given to the National Gallery, where his Dido building Carthage (1815) and Sun Rising through Vapour (before 1807) remain on display with paintings by Claude (as stipulated in Turner’s will). However, the rest of the 300 paintings and 30,000 sketches and watercolours are now housed in the Clore Gallery at Tate Britain.

The greatest horror

Human Laundry, Belsen: April 1945, Doris Zinkeisen, Imperial War Museum

Doris Zinkeisen had been a portrait painter and theatre designer in 1920s London, but with the onset of the Second World War she became an Official War Artist, one of only 52 women to be appointed, against 350 men. When the British liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, she was the first artist to witness its horrors. Some 60,000 prisoners a hair’s breadth from death were crammed in, next to thousands of corpses. ‘The shock of Belsen was never to be forgotten,’ she wrote home. Paintings such as Human Laundry, Belsen: April 1945 are moving portrayals of the skeletal bodies she encountered and the work of the Red Cross in trying to save the lives of those who had escaped death.

In the same boat

Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, Yinka Shonibare, Royal Museums Greenwich

Outside the National Maritime Museum in London is a three-masted ship with brightly coloured sails made from African batik fabric. It is a scaled-down copy of Nelson’s flagship HMS Victory, encased in a huge bottle. Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle (2010) was made by Yinka Shonibare, who uses batik fabric in his work to signify the complex identities of British Nigerians such as himself. Batik fabrics were first made in Indonesia, before the technique was imported to Europe and colonial Africa in the 19th century. As Nigeria regained its independence from British rule in 1960, her people embraced the textile art form as symbolic of African nationhood, adding another layer to its identity. Since the 1990s, Shonibare has used batik to clothe headless mannequins, as the sails of colonial vessels and for the covers of Imperial (and immigrant) texts, asking us to consider the complexity of being British in a post-colonial world.

Follow the links for our other instalments of this series which look at the East of England and Ireland.

This feature originally appeared in the December 31, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.