Collection highlights

Turner left the nation almost his entire studio, and the Clore Gallery is where that bequest lives. Sea storms, sunsets and half-finished experiments that look startlingly modern. Even a 20-minute visit here is worth the trip.

Millais's Ophelia is the picture most people arrive for, and it rewards standing close: the riverbank flowers were painted from life over months. Around it sit works by Rossetti, Hunt and Burne-Jones, all jewel colours and intense detail.

Hogarth gives you eighteenth-century London with all its noise and satire. Blake's small, strange visionary works need a quiet moment. Constable brings the English countryside, skies included, painted with more energy than the biscuit tins suggest.

The later rooms move through Stanley Spencer, Barbara Hepworth, Francis Bacon and Bridget Riley towards artists working today. It is where the gallery feels least like a museum and most like an argument about what Britain is.

Correct as of August 2026 — check tate.org.uk before you travel.