During our Summer, 2024 trip to London, Brian and I were super excited to visit the National Gallery, which boasts THREE Caravaggio paintings. We were quite disappointed to learn, though, that while we were visiting, two of the three paintings were going to be off on loan elsewhere. This gap was made up for, however, with the addition of Caravaggio’s final painting, “The Martyrdom of St. Ursula,” which is normally in Naples, Italy. Check out my Caravaggio page as well as the Baroque Art Accessibility Consortium’s website for more info on our passion for all things Caravaggio and Baroque!

The National Gallery is actually a very reasonably sized museum – and it’s laid out in such a way that you can walk through most, if not all of it in about 2-3 hours. It’s free to get in, but I would recommend booking tickets in advance, especially in the summer, as queues are long.

The building itself is located very centrally, right on Trafalgar Square, so it’s also a great place to plan a day from. You can easily walk to a ton of other tourist attractions from here, and it’s a really fun, bustling area.

Apart from the Carvaggio paintings, there are some other very famous pictures here, and most people come and crowd around Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.

There are a few other rooms of Impressionist works as well, though I wouldn’t say the collection is super impressive. There were so very cool Cezanne works here, though, and they are worth looking for including ‘La Route en Provence’ and the more disturbing, ‘An Old Woman With A Rosary.’

There’s a stunning, and somewhat creepy Da Vinci here as well, and that’s definitely worth checking out.

Finally I loved this baroque depiction of St. John the Baptist as a child by Murillo, which was really dark, yet somehow soothing.

We spent the better part of a morning here, and really enjoyed ourselves. The building itself is almost as impressive as the art contained within it, so don’t forget to look up while walking around.