Tate Britain, London

Address: Millbank, London
Opening hours: Daily: 10:00 - 17:50
No admission fee

Created through the generosity of the sugar tycoon and philanthropist Sir Henry Tate, this splendid art gallery is actually part of a family of museums consisting of Tate Modern in London and two other galleries elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Tate Britian, which opened its door in 1897 on the north bank of the River Thames close to Lambeth Bridge, serves as home to an incomparable collection of national art ranging from 1500 up until the present day. Among the artists featured in its collection, the most internationally recognized are J.M.W. Turner and William Blake. As a rule, crowds of visitors fill the entire Clore Pavillion to admire 300 works by the former (especially worthy of note are the depictions of the land and sea battles of the Napoleonic Wars). Furthermore, the permanent exhibition includes a large quantity of crucial pre-Raphaelite masterworks. You will find here the earliest paintings in oil by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which doubtless are significant crowd pullers, as well as his later pieces, such as "Monna Vanna" and "Beata Beatrix". Among a multitude of Victorian paintings, feast your eyes on Holman Hunt's "Strayed Sheep", Millais's "Ophelia", "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid" by Burne-Jones, Waterhouse's "The Lady of Shalott", and "Hope" by Watts. The Tate also presents work of the animal painter, George Stubbs, and that of Stanley Spencer, artist famous for his religious-allegorical scenes, landscapes and erotic portraits. The gallery normally handles a changing collection of watercolors.