# National Gallery London audio guide, five stops, free.

Five paintings, five rooms, nothing to install. Chiaro's app takes over for the other thousand hanging on these walls, from a photo.

Made by Chiaro. Not affiliated with The National Gallery. Page: https://chiaro.ai/museums/national-gallery-london/

Five paintings on one floor, in the order the building now tells its story. You start in the Sainsbury Wing with van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait in Room 52, one room along from Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks in Room 51, cross into the main building for Holbein's Ambassadors in Room 4, then walk forward three centuries to Delaroche's Execution of Lady Jane Grey in Room 38 and Turner's Fighting Temeraire in Room 40. About ten minutes of audio, and an hour and a quarter on foot if you actually stop and look.

Catalogue lines, room numbers and dates here come from the National Gallery's own painting pages on nationalgallery.org.uk, each checked against a second source, and all five were confirmed on 6 September 2026. The Gallery has building work in progress and moves pictures between rooms, so if the label on the wall says something else, believe the label and write to us.

## The stops

### 1. The Arnolfini Portrait

Jan van Eyck · 1434 · Oil on wood (probably oak), 82.2 × 60 cm · Room 52, Sainsbury Wing, Level 2

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/museums/national-gallery-london/en/arnolfini-portrait.mp3?v=1116829 (140 s)

Look for:
- The mirror on the back wall. Ten roundels around its frame carry scenes from the death of Christ, and the curved glass reflects two men standing where you are standing.
- The chandelier. One candle is lit and one has been snuffed out, which is one of the reasons people keep arguing about what this picture is for.
- The shadow of the dog's front leg. Van Eyck's thumbprint is pressed into the paint beside it.
- The oranges, one on the sill and more on the chest below. Imported fruit that expensive was a way of saying how much money was in the house.

Eighty-two centimetres by sixty, on a panel of oak, and every part of it is working. Give yourself a moment before you start reading the objects, because the room is the point. This is a reception room in Bruges in 1434, painted as though Jan van Eyck had lifted away one wall and asked you to stand in the gap.

The man is almost certainly Giovanni di Nicolao di Arnolfini, an Italian merchant from Lucca who traded in Bruges and was in his late thirties that year. The woman is probably his second wife, and nobody knows her name. For a long time this was read as a wedding, a marriage contract in paint. The National Gallery does not read it that way any more, though you can see how the argument started: the raised hand, the joined palms, the little terrier that stands for faithfulness.

Now the mirror. It hangs dead centre on the back wall, and its convex glass swallows the whole room and hands it back to you curved. In the doorway behind you, two men are coming in, one of them raising an arm. Around the frame are ten tiny roundels painted with scenes from the death of Christ. And immediately above it, in curling Latin script that belongs on a legal document rather than a painting, van Eyck wrote: Jan van Eyck was here. 1434. Not painted this. Was here.

Much of what looks like plain observation is not. The chandelier cannot fit the space it appears to hang in. There is no fireplace. The bed is too short and the mirror is impossibly large. Infrared photographs show that van Eyck first drew the figures, the furniture and the architecture, and only added the dog, the chandelier, the chair, the amber beads and the discarded muddy overshoes at a late stage. He also gave the man a smaller head and better proportions than the underdrawing had.

Two things to check with your own eyes. The chandelier holds one lit candle and one that has been put out. And she is not pregnant. She is holding up an armful of expensive green wool in front of her, which is what women did with a gown that heavy.

The picture reached this wall by a long road. It belonged to Margaret of Austria, then passed into the Spanish royal collection, and by 1816 it was in London with a Scottish colonel named James Hay, who said he had fallen in love with it while recovering in Brussels from a wound taken at Waterloo. He offered it to the Prince Regent, who kept it on approval at Carlton House for two years and then sent it back. In 1842 the National Gallery bought it for six hundred pounds. It was the first Netherlandish painting the Gallery ever owned, and if you look at the shadow of the dog's front leg, you are looking at van Eyck's thumbprint, pressed into the paint while it was still soft.

### 2. The Virgin of the Rocks

Leonardo da Vinci · About 1491/2-9 and 1506-8 · Oil on wood (poplar, identified), 189.5 × 120 cm · Room 51, Sainsbury Wing, Level 2

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/museums/national-gallery-london/en/virgin-of-the-rocks.mp3?v=970126 (121 s)

Look for:
- The thin gilded reed cross under the arm of the child on the left. That is how you know he is Saint John the Baptist and the cross-legged baby on the right is Christ.
- The Virgin's temples and the bridge of her nose, where the edges dissolve into shadow instead of ending in a line. That softening is sfumato.
- The flowers at the bottom left. Leonardo drew plants with forensic accuracy all his life, and these belong to no real species at all.
- The haloes: hair-thin gold ellipses above every head except the angel's.

The panel stands on a plinth rather than hanging on the wall, and that is deliberate. This was the centre of an altarpiece, and the Gallery has given it back roughly the height an altarpiece would have had, so you are looking up into the grotto the way a congregation in Milan once did.

Four figures kneel in a cave. The Virgin in the middle, an infant Saint John the Baptist on the left with a thin gilded reed cross under his arm, the infant Christ sitting cross-legged on the right with a hand raised in blessing, and an angel steadying him from behind. If you cannot tell which baby is which, the cross is the giveaway.

There are two paintings of this composition. The first is in the Louvre. This is the second, made for the same Milanese contract, and the clearest difference is the angel, who here looks down and does not point. The contract was signed in April 1483, between Leonardo, the brothers de Predis and the confraternity of the Immaculate Conception at the church of San Francesco Grande. The pope had only sanctioned that feast in 1477. The subject was so new that there was no accepted way to paint it, which left Leonardo free to invent one, and what he invented was a wet, primeval cave.

Conservation work shows he painted this version in three phases over about fifteen years. He probably began in the early 1490s with the gauze sleeve of the angel. A few years later he turned the head of the Christ Child from three-quarters round to pure profile. In 1499 he left Milan for Florence to get away from the French invasion, and he was summoned back in 1506 to finish the job, adding the layer of ultramarine to the sky that the original contract had specifically demanded.

Two things to look at closely. The Virgin's temples and the bridge of her nose: the edges do not end in a line, they dissolve into shadow. That softening is what came to be called sfumato, from the Italian for turning to smoke. Then the flowers at the bottom left. Leonardo filled notebooks with exact botanical studies, and these plants are not any real species. He crossed and invented them, and set them among rock cones that look as though they have just pushed up out of the earth.

Some passages look unfinished from close range. That was probably deliberate, so your eye settles where he wants it. The National Gallery bought the painting in 1880 from the Earl of Suffolk, and it came off a two-year restoration in 2010.

### 3. The Ambassadors

Hans Holbein the Younger · 1533 · Oil on wood (Baltic/Polish oak, identified), 207 × 209.5 cm · Room 4, Level 2

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/museums/national-gallery-london/en/the-ambassadors.mp3?v=1048075 (131 s)

Look for:
- The grey smear across the floor. Stand at the bottom right corner of the painting, close to the wall, look back along the surface, and it becomes a skull.
- The top left corner, where the green curtain is pulled back a few centimetres over a silver crucifix that is easy to miss entirely.
- The lute with one broken string, and beside it a case built for five flutes holding four.
- The lower globe. Find Polisy, the hamlet in Champagne where Dinteville had his chateau and where this painting hung for centuries.

Before you look at anything else, walk to the bottom right corner of the painting, stand close to the wall and look back along its surface. The grey smear on the floor between the two men will pull itself together into a human skull. That is anamorphosis, an image stretched along one axis so it resolves from only one spot in the room. Holbein buried a reminder of death inside a portrait of two young diplomats at the top of their careers.

On the left is Jean de Dinteville, ambassador of Francis the First of France. On the right is his friend Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur. Both men were in their twenties. The year is 1533, the worst possible year to be a French diplomat in London. The pope would not annul Henry the Eighth's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, so Henry married Anne Boleyn anyway and put himself at the head of a church of his own. Dinteville had stood in for his king at the wedding, was required to stay in London for the coronation and then for the birth of the baby Elizabeth in September, and wrote home describing himself as the most melancholy, weary and wearisome ambassador that was ever seen. His friend was in London only from April to June, and it cheered him up. This painting is partly a record of those weeks.

The shelf between them is a coded argument. The upper level holds instruments for measuring time, altitude and the position of the stars, of the kind Henry's royal astronomer Nicholas Kratzer made. The lower level is where things go wrong. One string of the lute is broken. The leather case holds four flutes where there should be five, so they cannot be played in harmony. The arithmetic book is propped open with a set square at the page on division. The hymn book is Lutheran, and Holbein has deliberately shown two pages that do not follow each other in the real book. Discord, division, a continent coming apart, laid out like goods in a shop window.

On the terrestrial globe below you can find Polisy, a hamlet about two hundred kilometres south-east of Paris. That was Dinteville's chateau, and that is where this picture hung. An inventory from January 1589 records it in the great hall there.

One last thing, top left. The green damask curtain is pulled back by a few centimetres, and behind it hangs a silver crucifix, almost invisible. Holbein rarely signed his paintings. He signed and dated this one on the marble floor, more elaborately than anything else he left, which suggests he knew what he had made. The National Gallery bought it in 1890.

### 4. The Execution of Lady Jane Grey

Paul Delaroche · 1833 · Oil on canvas, 246 × 297 cm · Room 38, Level 2

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/museums/national-gallery-london/en/execution-of-lady-jane-grey.mp3?v=1103873 (138 s)

Look for:
- The straw at the bottom of the canvas. It is the brightest thing on the floor and it is there to soak up blood.
- The hands. Jane's grope forward, Sir John's guide them, and the executioner holds his axe loosely at his side, which is not how the 1832 sketch had him.
- Nobody looks out at you. Two of the three women have turned away or cannot see, so the only witnesses in the room are the two men, and whoever is standing where you are.
- The spiked tops of soldiers' halberds rising from a staircase behind the platform, between Sir John and the executioner.

The straw at the bottom of this canvas is the brightest thing on the floor, and it is there to soak up blood. Nothing at all stands between it and you.

Lady Jane Grey was Queen of England for nine days in July 1553, after the death of Edward the Sixth, until the faction backing his Catholic half-sister Mary Tudor removed her. She was tried for treason and beheaded at Tower Green on the twelfth of February 1554. She was seventeen.

Paul Delaroche paints the second before it. Blindfolded, she has lost the block and is feeling for it, and the grey-haired man in the fur collar guiding her hands is Sir John Brydges, Lieutenant of the Tower. Delaroche named his source in the Salon catalogue, a book about Protestant martyrs printed in 1558, in which Jane asks: what shall I do? where is the block?

Almost nothing else here is accurate. She was executed outdoors, not in a vaulted stone interior. What Delaroche built instead is a stage. A shallow platform, life-size figures, hard theatrical light, and a paint surface so smooth you cannot find a brushstroke in it. Paris in the 1830s was full of panoramas, dioramas and tableaux vivants, actors holding a silent pose under coloured light, and he saw all of them. The likely model for Jane was Mademoiselle Anaïs, an actress of the Comédie-Française with whom he was romantically involved.

Watch what the hands do, because that is where he puts the feeling. Jane's grope forward. Sir John's guide. The executioner holds his axe loosely at his side and looks down. In a watercolour of 1832 that man was stockier, carried a broadsword and simply waited to get on with it; Delaroche changed the weapon and softened the face. Notice too that nobody in the painting looks out at you, and the two women on the left have turned to the wall or cannot see, so the only witnesses are the two men, and whoever stands where you are.

The Salon of 1834 loved it. Crowds gathered and pressed forward to get close. Critics called it theatrical and accused Delaroche of lifting the composition from an English engraving. Then it disappeared. For decades it was believed destroyed when the Thames flooded the Tate Gallery in 1928. In 1973 a Tate curator called Christopher Johnstone, going through the damaged canvases from that flood for a book on the painter John Martin, unrolled one and found a second painting rolled inside it. The Martin was ruined. The Delaroche was in good condition. It came here instead, went back on a wall in 1975, and has been one of the most looked-at pictures in the building since.

### 5. The Fighting Temeraire

Joseph Mallord William Turner · 1839 · Oil on canvas, 90.7 × 121.6 cm · Room 40, Level 2

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/museums/national-gallery-london/en/the-fighting-temeraire.mp3?v=981202 (123 s)

Look for:
- The top left corner. A thin crescent moon has already risen on the opposite side of the sky from the setting sun.
- The tug's black funnel, standing in front of its mast instead of behind it, so the soot blows back through the warship's rigging. No paddle tug was built that way.
- The dark buoy in the bottom right corner. It is what gives the river its scale and balances the white disc of the sun.
- The clouds around the sun, where the paint is laid on thickly enough to stand up off the canvas.

Almost everything in front of you is untrue, and Turner knew it while he was painting.

The ship under tow is the Temeraire, a ninety-eight gun three-decker built from the timber of more than five thousand oaks, which had put herself between the French guns and Nelson's Victory at Trafalgar in 1805. By 1838 she was five days short of forty years old, moored off Sheerness as a supply ship, and worth only her wood. In June the Admiralty ordered her sold. The Navy stripped out the masts, the yards and everything reusable, so what went up the Thames was an empty hull, bought for five thousand five hundred and thirty pounds by John Beatson, a shipbreaker at Rotherhithe. Two hired steam tugs took about two days to drag her there, and she tied up at the breaker's wharf on the sixth of September 1838.

Turner almost certainly did not see it happen. He may not even have been in the country. He built the scene out of newspaper reports, and then he improved it.

He put the masts back, furled and part-rigged, on a hull that had none. He repainted her from black and yellow into white and gold, so she glides up the river like her own ghost. He cut the two tugs to one. And he moved the tug's black funnel forward of its mast, so the soot blows backwards through the warship's rigging. Literal-minded viewers pointed out the mistake at once, and when an engraver later corrected the funnel, Turner was furious.

Then the sun. A ship coming up the Thames is heading west, so it cannot have the sunset behind it in the east. It set off a lively argument in the letters pages of The Times. Turner put the light where he wanted it and laid it on so thickly around the sun that in places the paint stands off the canvas. Look at the top left corner: a thin crescent moon has already risen on the other side of the sky.

He hung it at the Royal Academy in 1839 with two lines adapted from Thomas Campbell: the flag which braved the battle and the breeze, no longer owns her. Sure enough, the Temeraire flies nothing, while the little tug flies its white commercial flag high. Turner turned down every offer, called it his Darling, and kept it until he died in 1851. It came to the nation in the Turner Bequest and was one of the first works from it to go on show. In 2005 a radio poll made it the nation's favourite painting, and since 2020 it has been on the back of the twenty-pound note.

## Before you go

Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN. Everyone goes in through the Sainsbury Wing, which faces the square at the corner of Pall Mall and Whitcomb Street. All bags go through metal detectors, and wheeled luggage is not allowed.

Charing Cross is the closest station, roughly 200 metres away, on the Bakerloo and Northern lines with the mainline terminus above it. Leicester Square, on the Northern and Piccadilly lines, is about the same walk. For step-free access the Gallery points to Tottenham Court Road (Central, Northern and Elizabeth lines) or Westminster (Jubilee, District and Circle). Buses stop at Saint Martin's Place, Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross station.

- Admission to the collection is free, and there is no weekly closing day. Open every day from 10 to 6, and until 9 on Friday, apart from 24 to 26 December and 1 January.
- Booking a free general admission ticket online gets you fast-track entry, but walking up still works.
- Building work has closed Rooms 7, 8, 16, 17, 17a and 31, and paintings get moved. If you are coming for one particular picture, check its page on nationalgallery.org.uk the morning you set out.
- Two of the Gallery's best-known paintings were out on loan on 6 September 2026: Van Gogh's Sunflowers is in Philadelphia and Constable's Hay Wain is in Ipswich. Do not plan a visit around either without checking.

Official tickets: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/visiting/plan-your-visit

The Gallery sells a collection tour of more than 60 stops, run through the Smartify app on your own phone with your own headphones: a few pounds if you book it online in advance and a little more on the day, with the current price on nationalgallery.org.uk. Separately, the Gallery gives away written notes on every painting on display, on its website and through the same app. The five stops on this page cost nothing, and the Chiaro app narrates whatever else you point it at.

Official site: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk

## Questions

**Is there a free National Gallery audio guide?**

This page is one. Five paintings, five recordings that play straight in your browser with the transcript underneath and the room number at the top, and nothing to download at the door. Beyond those five, the Chiaro app narrates any painting in the building from a photo you take in front of it.

**How much is the official National Gallery audio guide?**

Five pounds if you book it online before you go, and two pounds more if you buy it on the day. It runs to more than 60 stops through the Smartify app, so you play it on your own phone and bring your own headphones. Check nationalgallery.org.uk for the current price.

**Where is the Arnolfini Portrait in the National Gallery?**

Room 52, in the Sainsbury Wing, up the stairs from the main entrance and one room along from the Leonardo. The room is titled Creating Illusion: Netherlandish Painting 1420 to 1480. Van Eyck's panel is small, 82 by 60 centimetres, so look for the crowd rather than the size.

**What days is the National Gallery closed?**

Only 24, 25 and 26 December and 1 January. There is no weekly closed day: it opens every day of the week from 10 in the morning until 6 in the evening, and stays open until 9 on Fridays.

**Is the National Gallery free?**

Yes. General admission to the collection is free and always has been, because the collection is held in trust for the public. Donations are welcome and some temporary exhibitions are ticketed, but the five paintings on this page cost nothing to see.

**Can I see Sunflowers at the National Gallery?**

Not on 6 September 2026. Van Gogh's Sunflowers, NG3863, is on loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Constable's Hay Wain is away in Ipswich. Both are usually here, so check the painting's own page on nationalgallery.org.uk before you build a visit around it.

## Continue in the app

Chiaro knows the other thousand paintings in here.

Five paintings is all a web page can carry. The app has no such limit: photograph any picture on any wall of the Gallery, from a Sienese altarpiece to a Monet water-lily, and Chiaro tells you what you are looking at and keeps answering while you stand there.

Download Chiaro: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6745618830?pt=127817940&ct=national-gallery-london-md&mt=8