Tate Britain · London · Independent guide
Tate Britain audio guide,
five stops, free.
All five play in the browser, and entry costs nothing — this is Tate Britain on Millbank, not Tate Modern. Chiaro takes the other seven hundred-odd works on display from a photo.
Made by Chiaro. Not affiliated with Tate Britain.
Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth
Tate Britain, London
That was the free part
Chiaro narrates any work in Tate Britain from a photo.
The five stops · 11 minutes of audio
Five works, one walk,
in the order you will walk them.
Five works, three rooms, one floor, and the whole gallery is free to walk into. It starts in the Clore Gallery, the wing built to hold the Turner Bequest, at Room 35, then goes west into Room 8 for Leighton's bronze and Waterhouse's Lady of Shalott, and finishes in Room 10 with the two Pre-Raphaelite paintings most people came for. About ten minutes of listening, and about an hour on foot if you stop and look properly.
Every fact in this guide is checked against Tate's own collection database and a second source, and the rooms were last confirmed on 8 September 2026. Tate rehangs often, so if a wall label disagrees with us, trust the label and tell us.
Stop 1 of 5 · Clore Gallery, Main Floor, Room 35 (Toil and Terror at Sea)
Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth
Joseph Mallord William Turner · Exhibited 1842 · Oil paint on canvas, 914 × 1219 mm
Look for
- The steamboat. There is a mast and a dark paddle-box near the middle, and the black smoke from the funnel is dragged into the same spiral as the snow. Critics in 1842 complained they could not find the boat at all.
- The missing horizon. Ruskin's point about this painting was that no line is left between air and sea, and no landmark or evidence of position survives anywhere in it.
- The greys. Ruskin called them the most hopeless, desolate, uncontrasted greys, and in the same breath called them among the finest pieces of colour Turner ever made.
Transcript (2:10)
Stand close first, then step back, because it does something different at each distance. Up close it is smeared grey and brown, dragged round in a spiral. From a few paces away a ship comes out of it: a mast, a dark paddle-box, a flag, and a plume of black smoke that the wind pulls into exactly the same spiral as the snow.
Turner showed it at the Royal Academy in 1842 under a title longer than most sentences. Snow Storm — Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich. He called himself the Author, not the artist, and Ruskin thought the word choice was significant.
Turner told a clergyman, William Kingsley, what it had cost him. I did not paint it to be understood, he said, but I wished to show what such a scene was like. I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it. I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape, but I felt bound to record it if I did. Then he added, and no one had any business to like the picture.
It is a wonderful story and it may not be true. Tate's own catalogue notes that no ship called Ariel is known to have been lost or caught in a storm in the years before 1842, or to have worked out of Harwich then. One suggestion is that Turner misremembered the Fairy, which left Harwich in November 1840 and went down with all hands. Another scholar pointed out that being lashed to a mast sounds suspiciously like stories already told about an earlier marine painter, Joseph Vernet. Turner may simply have been at Margate, watching from dry land.
The critics went for it. Somebody called it soapsuds and whitewash, and Ruskin remembered Turner sitting by the fire after dinner muttering, soapsuds and whitewash, what would they have, I wonder what they think the sea's like, I wish they'd been in it. The Athenaeum said Turner had chosen to paint with cream, or chocolate, yolk of egg, or currant jelly, and that where the steam-boat was, and which were the signals, were matters past its finding out. The Art Union suggested waiting until the storm cleared before attempting any further account of the vessel, and added, the sooner the better.
Ruskin's answer, in Modern Painters, was that this is one of the very grandest statements of sea-motion, mist and light ever put on canvas, even by Turner. Of course it was not understood, he wrote. His finest works never are.
Photo by Andreas Praefcke, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Photo: Andreas Praefcke
Stop 2 of 5 · Main Floor, Room 8 (Art for the Crowd 1815–1905)
An Athlete Wrestling with a Python
Frederic, Lord Leighton · 1877 · Bronze, 1746 × 984 × 1099 mm, 290 kg
Look for
- The surface. New Sculpture was naturalism worked out through modelling, so the ribs, the tendons and the strain across the shoulders read like a body under load rather than an ideal diagram.
- The python's coils, and the fact that they leave the body altogether and run down to the base. Lost wax casting is what let Leighton keep that much undercutting and still hold the scales sharp.
- The back. It is free-standing and life size, 1,746 millimetres tall, so walk round it: the twist of the spine says more than the front view does.
Transcript (1:49)
It is bronze, it is life size, and it weighs 290 kilogrammes, which you would not guess from the way it seems to be moving. A naked man has a python wound around him from shoulder to ankle. He has both hands on its neck and is forcing the head away from his own, and his weight is going the other way, out onto a braced back foot.
Walk around it before you do anything else. That is what it is for. Leighton made it free-standing, to be read from every angle, and from behind the twist of the spine tells you more than the front does.
Frederic Leighton was a painter as well as a sculptor — his Bath of Psyche hangs in this same room — and this is one of only two life-size sculptures he ever made. Both were modelled with the help of Thomas Brock. Tate is blunt about the ambition: in subject and in scale this was meant as a challenge to the Laocoön, the classical group showing three men being crushed by sea serpents.
What it started was bigger than one bronze. Leighton is credited as a founder of what became known in Britain as the New Sculpture, an approach that kept looking back at classical models while concentrating on the naturalism of the body, worked out through the surface. So look at the surface. The ribs. The tendon behind the knee. The way the muscle bunches at the shoulder where the snake pulls. It was cast by the lost wax method, which Tate says allowed that precision, and which is why the scales stay crisp even where the coils swing clear of the body.
It came to the nation in 1877, presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest. Sir Francis Chantrey was himself a sculptor, and he left a fortune whose income was to buy paintings and sculpture made in Britain, specifically in order to encourage a national collection of British art. The fund is run by the Royal Academy, and Tate's records put the first Chantrey purchase in that same year, 1877, after the death of Lady Chantrey. Until the 1920s the Chantrey money was this gallery's main purchase grant. For four decades, a great deal of what Britain bought for itself came out of one dead sculptor's will.
Stop 3 of 5 · Main Floor, Room 8 (Art for the Crowd 1815–1905)
The Lady of Shalott
John William Waterhouse · 1888 · Oil paint on canvas, 1530 × 2000 mm
Look for
- Her right hand on the chain, low at the front of the boat. The entire painting is the instant she lets go.
- The three candles set out on the bow in front of a crucifix. Two have already blown out; one is still alight.
- The cloth hanging over the side. That is her weaving, and Lancelot is worked into it — the man she was not allowed to look at, travelling downriver with her.
- The birds skimming low over the water on the left, and the wind in her hair. Tate reads both as omens; the wind is what killed the candles.
Transcript (1:56)
Everything here is about a hand letting go of a chain. Find it first: her right hand, low down at the front of the boat, resting on the links.
Tennyson published the poem in 1832. A woman lives alone in a tower on an island called Shalott, on a river that runs down from King Arthur's castle at Camelot, under a curse nobody ever explains to her. She may not look at the world directly. She is allowed to see it only as a reflection in a mirror, and she weaves what she sees. Then Lancelot rides past, and she looks. The mirror cracks from side to side. She comes down to the water, finds a boat, lets go of the chain, and the broad stream bears her away towards Camelot, singing her last song, and she dies before she arrives.
Waterhouse chose the second of the release, and then set out the evidence around her like a small altar on the bow: a crucifix, and three candles. Two have already blown out. One is still burning. Now look at the cloth hanging over the side of the boat. That is her weaving, and Lancelot is in it, worked in thread, coming downriver with her.
Nothing else in the picture is decoration either. Birds skim low over the water on the left. The wind is in her hair, and it is the same wind that took the candles. Tate's gallery label calls the birds house martins and its shorter online caption calls them swallows; either way, they are there to tell you how this ends.
The landscape is oddly real for a legend. This came out of a short period when Waterhouse was painting outdoors, and nobody has ever identified the stretch of water, though the family often went to Somerset and Devon. The model is traditionally said to be the artist's wife. His biographer records that Waterhouse owned a copy of Tennyson's collected works and had filled every blank page in it with pencil sketches for pictures.
He painted her again six years later, in 1894, in a version now in Leeds, showing the earlier moment when she turns from the mirror to the window and the curse comes down. This is the 1888 one, and it arrived at Millbank in the most direct way possible: it was one of the original paintings Henry Tate gave to the nation, which is also how the gallery around you came to exist.
Stop 4 of 5 · Main Floor, Room 10 (Beauty as Protest 1845–1905)
The Awakening Conscience
William Holman Hunt · 1853 · Oil paint on canvas, 762 × 559 mm
Look for
- The mirror behind her. It is the only place in the picture where the sunlit garden she is staring at actually appears, and the whole painting depends on it.
- The cat under the table, which has caught a bird with a broken wing. The man's arm around her makes the same shape as the cat's paw.
- The floor: his discarded glove, a tangle of unfinished tapestry wool, and a fallen sheet of Edward Lear's setting of Tennyson's Tears, Idle Tears.
- The frame, which Hunt designed: a star above her head for revelation, and a border of alternating bells and marigolds for warning and sorrow.
Transcript (2:10)
Small painting, enormous argument. Start with the mirror behind her, because without it none of this makes sense. Everything she has fixed her eyes on — a garden, full daylight, an open window — exists in this canvas only as that reflection. You are standing roughly where the garden is. She is looking straight through you at a life she used to have.
William Holman Hunt painted it in 1853, and he did not invent the room: he rented one, at Woodbine Villa, 7 Alpha Place, in Saint John's Wood, so that every object would be exactly right. A man has installed a woman in a house he pays for. They have been at the piano with Thomas Moore's song Oft in the Stilly Night, and the tune has reminded her of something, and she is coming up off his lap mid-note.
Then Hunt fills the room with the sentence he wants read. Under the table, a cat has caught a bird with a broken wing, and the man's arm round her makes exactly the shape the cat's paw makes. On the floor, his discarded glove, a tangle of unfinished tapestry wool, and a fallen sheet of Edward Lear's setting of Tennyson's Tears, Idle Tears. On the wallpaper, a cupid asleep while birds eat the grapes and the corn, and on the piano a clock sealed inside a glass dome. Hunt designed the frame as well, and loaded that with emblems too.
Nobody read it. The painting caused a scandal at the Royal Academy in 1854, and Ruskin wrote to The Times that May to explain what it meant, ending on the hem of her dress. The painter has laboured at it thread by thread, he said, and it has story in it if you think how soon its pure whiteness may be soiled with dust and rain.
The woman is Annie Miller. Hunt met her in 1850, when she was fifteen and working as a barmaid, and Tate's own caption says he hoped the picture would persuade her of the dangers of exactly this kind of dependence. She became a much sought-after Pre-Raphaelite model, and she married an aristocrat. Her face here is not the one he first painted, either: in 1856 and 1857 Hunt repainted it, because the owner found the original expression too pained. One account says he came to regret it.
If you can see past the frame at the top corners, there is handwriting on the canvas itself, in the spandrels. It is Hunt, leaving notes for future restorers about the varnish he used in 1864 and again in 1886, and asking whoever came next to please copy the note down before painting over it.
Stop 5 of 5 · Main Floor, Room 10 (Beauty as Protest 1845–1905)
Ophelia
Sir John Everett Millais · 1851–2 · Oil paint on canvas, 762 × 1118 mm
Look for
- The poppy floating near her right hand. Of all the flowers Millais put in the water, that is the one that means death.
- The chain of violets around her neck, standing for faithfulness, chastity, or the death of the young.
- The dress: a real antique gown flowered over in silver embroidery, which Millais bought second-hand for four pounds and thought a bargain.
- Her open mouth. In the line being illustrated she is still singing, which is why she is not yet drowned.
Transcript (2:50)
There is usually a crowd here, so wait for a gap and get close: at arm's length it stops being famous and turns back into the bank of a real river.
Millais is painting a few lines from Hamlet, the ones where Gertrude describes the drowning. Ophelia's clothes spread wide and, mermaid-like, bore her up a while, until her garments, heavy with their drink, pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay to muddy death. Look at Ophelia's mouth. It is open. In the line he is illustrating she is still singing, which is why she is not yet dead, and it is the most uncomfortable thing in the painting.
He made it in two halves, and the background came first. In July 1851 Millais went to Ewell in Surrey and painted this bank leaf by leaf, outdoors, on the Hogsmill river, for months. He wrote to a friend that his martyrdom was worse than any he had experienced. The flies of Surrey, he said, are more muscular and have a still greater propensity for probing human flesh. He was threatened with a summons for trespassing in a field and destroying the hay. He was in danger of being blown by the wind into the water. Painting a picture under such circumstances, he concluded, would be a greater punishment to a murderer than hanging.
The figure came afterwards, in the studio, and that half of the story is worse. The model was Elizabeth Siddal, herself an artist and a poet, later married to Rossetti. She lay in a bath full of water for four months, wearing an antique dress Millais had bought for the purpose. Really splendid, he wrote, all flowered over in silver embroidery, and old and dirty as it was it cost him four pounds. The water was kept warm by lamps underneath the bath. One day the lamps went out. Siddal caught a severe cold, and her father threatened him with legal action until he agreed to pay the doctor's bills.
Now the flowers, which are the reason to stay here longer than you meant to. Almost every plant is deliberate and botanically exact. The roses by her cheek and on her dress may point to her brother Laertes calling her the rose of May. Willow, nettle and daisy stand for forsaken love, pain and innocence. Pansies mean love in vain. The chain of violets around her neck means faithfulness, or chastity, or the death of the young, and all three readings fit. Forget-me-nots float in the water. And near her right hand there is a poppy, which is the one that simply means death.
She was not the only Ophelia that season: Arthur Hughes exhibited his own version of her death scene in the same year. Tate's current label reads the picture as an argument rather than a lament: a critique of the Victorian habit of arranging marriages for money and status, made in a circle where Siddal and the other working-class women who joined it were challenging exactly those expectations.
And she came here by the shortest possible route. Ophelia was one of the sixty-five paintings the sugar refiner Henry Tate presented to the nation, along with the Waterhouse you were standing in front of ten minutes ago. Tate then paid to build the gallery you are standing in, which opened in 1897 on the site of the former Millbank prison. Two of his pictures became two of the most popular things in the building, and both of them are women floating down rivers.
Independent guide · Chiaro
Point Chiaro at anything in Tate Britain.
Five works, and this page has spent them. The Clore Gallery alone holds hundreds of Turners: photograph one, or a Blake the size of a postcard, or a label you cannot read from behind the rope, and the app answers out loud while you stand there.
Before you go
Getting there
Millbank, London SW1P 4RG. The Millbank entrance is closed until 2027 while the Clore Garden is built, so everyone comes in by the Manton Entrance on Atterbury Street, at the side of the building; it is step-free and opens onto the Lower Floor.
Pimlico, on the Victoria line, is the nearest Underground station, about 600 metres away, which Tate calls an eight-minute walk. Vauxhall, also Victoria line, is about 850 metres and is the nearest railway station. Bus 87 stops on Millbank, 88 and C10 on John Islip Street, and 2, 36, 185 and 436 on Vauxhall Bridge Road. The Tate to Tate RB2 boat runs from Millbank Pier to Tate Modern at Bankside every 30 minutes.
Tickets
- Entry to the collection is free for everyone and there is no need to book. The exhibitions are ticketed, and Tate recommends booking those in advance, though some tickets may be available at the door.
- Open every day, 10.00 to 18.00, with last entry at 17.30 and the galleries starting to close at 17.50. The only closures are 24, 25 and 26 December.
- This is Tate Britain on Millbank, not Tate Modern at Bankside. If you want both in a day, the RB2 boat runs directly between the two piers every 30 minutes.
- Tate says the gallery is quietest at the start and the end of the day. Bags larger than cabin size are not allowed in the building, the cloakroom is free, and the gallery is cashless.
The official audio guide
Tate Britain's visit pages list no paid audio guide for the collection. What they do list is free: volunteer-led guided tours of part of the gallery most days at 12.00, 13.00, 14.00 and 15.00, lasting about 45 minutes and starting at the top of the Rotunda stairs, plus free audio description recordings made primarily for blind and partially sighted visitors. Ticketed exhibitions can carry their own paid guide: the James McNeill Whistler show sells a £5 smartphone audio tour you add when booking. This page is free too, and covers five works out of the several hundred on the walls; the Chiaro app covers the others.
Official site →Questions
Is there a free Tate Britain audio guide?
This one: five stops that play in your browser, each with its transcript, and nothing to install. The Chiaro app takes it from there: point the camera at any work in the gallery and it narrates that one.
How much is the official Tate Britain audio guide?
There is none for the collection. Tate Britain's own pages list no paid audio guide for its permanent displays; what they list is free volunteer-led guided tours, most days at 12.00, 13.00, 14.00 and 15.00, about 45 minutes each from the top of the Rotunda stairs, plus free audio description recordings for blind and partially sighted visitors. Ticketed exhibitions are different: the James McNeill Whistler show sells a £5 smartphone audio tour that you add when you book.
Is Tate Britain free?
Yes. Entry to the collection is free for everyone and you do not need to book, which includes all five works on this page and the whole Turner display in the Clore Gallery. Only the temporary exhibitions are ticketed, and Tate recommends booking those in advance.
Where is Ophelia in Tate Britain?
Main Floor, Room 10, the display called Beauty as Protest 1845–1905. Hunt's The Awakening Conscience hangs in the same room. Tate rehangs its collection often and publishes the current room on each artwork page, so check there if you cannot find it.
Is Tate Britain the same as Tate Modern?
No, and people mix them up constantly. Tate Britain is on Millbank in Westminster and holds the national collection of British art, including the Turner Bequest and the Pre-Raphaelites. Tate Modern is at Bankside on the other side of the Thames. The Tate to Tate RB2 boat runs between the two piers every 30 minutes.
When is Tate Britain closed?
It is open every day of the week, 10.00 to 18.00, with last entry at 17.30. There is no weekly closed day. The gallery closes only on 24, 25 and 26 December.
More audio guides
Made by Chiaro. Not affiliated with Tate Britain.