David Nash: sculpture shaped by wood and landscape
From the moving Wooden Boulder to the living Ash Dome, David Nash has made wood, trees and the changing landscape central to a British sculptural practice.
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Richard Long: making sculpture through walking
The Bristol-born artist expanded the possibilities of sculpture through walks, landscape interventions and works made from natural materials.
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Paula Rego: stories, power and a life in British art
Born in Lisbon, Rego made her home in London and developed a distinctive body of paintings and prints shaped by Portuguese folklore, women’s lives and a close engagement with British art.
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Tony Cragg: from found fragments to sculptural forms
The Liverpool-born sculptor turned discarded materials and everyday objects into ambitious works, while building a career that connected British art with Germany and the wider world.
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Anish Kapoor
From pigment sculptures to public landmarks, Anish Kapoor has reshaped how audiences experience space, material and reflection.
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Chris Ofili: painting, material and cultural memory
From Manchester and London to Trinidad, the Turner Prize-winning artist has built a distinctive body of work from layered paint, collage and unexpected materials.
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Frank Auerbach: painting London through a lifetime of looking
The German-born British artist returned to a small circle of people and Camden streets, scraping away and repainting until each image felt right.
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Leon Kossoff: London seen through paint and memory
The British painter returned to the streets, stations and people of the city where he grew up, building a body of work through close observation and repeated drawing.
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Howard Hodgkin: painting memory in colour
The British painter and printmaker made intimate, often abstract works in which colour, memory and the frame became part of the subject.
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Rachel Whiteread: making absence visible
From the room-shaped sculpture Ghost to the concrete cast of House, Rachel Whiteread has made the spaces around everyday life her subject.
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Antony Gormley: the human body in public space
From the Angel of the North to the Turner Prize-winning Field for the British Isles, Gormley has made sculpture a lasting part of shared places.
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Gilbert & George: art made for everyone
From their East End home and living sculptures to the Turner Prize and a gallery of their own, Gilbert & George have made collaboration their subject as well as their method.
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Richard Hamilton: the artist who made everyday life Pop
From his 1956 collage of an imagined modern home to political paintings, printmaking and experiments with technology, Hamilton brought the images and objects of contemporary life into British art.
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Peter Blake: Pop Art, popular culture and the Sgt Pepper sleeve
From On the Balcony to the Beatles’ landmark album cover, Peter Blake made images drawn from everyday life part of British art’s wider conversation.
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Patrick Heron: Colour, light and the Cornish landscape
The painter’s path from early figurative work to abstraction was shaped by Cornwall, a close attention to colour and a writer’s understanding of how paintings work.
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Bridget Riley: making movement visible
The British painter transformed repeated lines, curves and colours into works that test how we see.
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Graham Sutherland: landscapes, war and the Churchill portrait
The English painter and printmaker transformed the forms of Pembrokeshire, recorded wartime damage and became one of post-war Britain’s most controversial portraitists.
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John Piper: the artist who made architecture speak
From wartime records of bomb-damaged churches to the great stained-glass window at Coventry Cathedral, Piper moved between modern art, landscape and design.
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John Singer Sargent: Portraiture between Paris and Britain
Born in Florence to American parents and trained in Paris, Sargent made London an important base for his career and painted works associated with British art.
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Peter Paul Rubens: the Flemish master in Britain
A diplomatic mission brought Rubens to the court of Charles I, where his art, his work with Anthony van Dyck and a royal commission left a substantial British connection.
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Gwen John: the painter who made stillness her subject
From her training at the Slade to a secluded working life in France, Gwen John developed a distinctive art of closely observed figures and quiet interiors.
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Stanley Spencer: Cookham, war and the sacred in ordinary life
The English painter turned the village where he was born and the experiences of two world wars into distinctive, often unsettling visions of faith and human fellowship.
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L. S. Lowry: painting the industrial North
From Pendlebury’s mills to the crowds in his urban landscapes, Lowry made the changing life of north-west England his distinctive subject.
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Edward Burne-Jones: painting a world of myth and beauty
From Birmingham to the Morris & Co. workshop, Burne-Jones brought medieval romance into painting, stained glass and the decorative arts.
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Ford Madox Brown: Painting Victorian Britain
A close associate of the Pre-Raphaelites, Brown brought labour, emigration and Manchester’s history into vivid focus.
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William Holman Hunt: Pre-Raphaelite painter of faith and detail
A founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hunt joined close observation of the visible world to religious subjects and elaborate symbolism.
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti: painter, poet and Pre-Raphaelite
A founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Rossetti brought poetry and painting together in work that helped shape British art and influenced artists across Europe.
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John Everett Millais: from Pre-Raphaelite beginnings to Royal Academy president
A child prodigy and founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Millais made paintings that ranged from the painstaking naturalism of Ophelia to the broader style of his later career.
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Thomas Gainsborough: portraitist and pioneer of British landscape
From Suffolk scenes to fashionable portraits and royal commissions, Gainsborough brought landscape and portraiture into an unusually close conversation.
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Sir Joshua Reynolds: portraiture, ambition and the Royal Academy
The Devon-born painter combined a prolific portrait practice with a lasting role in establishing the Royal Academy of Arts and raising the standing of British artists.
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Barbara Hepworth: carving modernism into the British landscape
From her Yorkshire training to her St Ives studio, Hepworth made sculpture in which solid form and open space became inseparable.
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Henry Moore: the sculptor who opened up modern British art
From his Yorkshire beginnings to public bronzes around the world, Moore made the human figure and the space around it central to modern sculpture.
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William Blake: Poet, Printmaker and Visionary
From the illuminated books he made with Catherine to his unfinished illustrations for Dante, Blake joined poetry and visual art in a body of work that outlasted his lifetime.
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Lucian Freud: the painter who made looking a prolonged act
From his Berlin childhood and London formation to the thickly worked portraits that made him one of Britain’s best-known figurative painters.
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Francis Bacon: painting the human figure under pressure
The Irish-born British painter made isolation, physical vulnerability and the open-mouthed face central to a body of work that changed post-war British art.
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Tracey Emin: turning private experience into public art
From Margate memories to My Bed and the British Pavilion in Venice, Emin has made autobiography a versatile artistic language.
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David Hockney: painting, photography and a changing way of seeing
From Bradford and the Royal College of Art to California, Yorkshire landscapes and iPad drawings, Hockney repeatedly tested how art could represent the world.
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Damien Hirst
A leading Young British Artist, Hirst made death, spectacle and the market for art central to a career that began with a student exhibition in London.
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John Constable: painting the places he knew
From the River Stour to the Royal Academy, Constable made the familiar Suffolk landscape a subject of ambition and lasting influence.
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J. M. W. Turner: light, landscape and a changing Britain
From London draughtsman to Royal Academician, Turner reshaped landscape painting while recording a nation in the grip of change.
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