What Are The Best Things To See At The National Portrait Gallery?
A room-by-room guide to the National Portrait Gallery's best portraits, from Holbein's Tudors to modern icons, plus ticket, timing and planning advice.
By James Whitfield, London Museums And Travel Writer
The National Portrait Gallery sits directly behind the National Gallery on St Martin's Place, a few steps off Trafalgar Square, and it answers a question no other museum in London answers in the same way: what did the people who made Britain actually look like? Entry to the permanent collection is free, the same as at the British Museum and the Tate galleries, which makes it one of the most generous afternoons in the city. The best things to see are the Tudor rooms on the top floor, the Victorian galleries, and the contemporary displays near the entrance, and most visitors can cover the highlights in about two hours.
What Are The Best Things To See At The National Portrait Gallery?
The must-sees are the Tudor galleries on the top floor, anchored by Hans Holbein's preparatory cartoon for the lost Whitehall mural of Henry VIII, the coronation portraits of Elizabeth I, the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, the Brontë sisters' painted group portrait, and the wall of modern sitters from pop stars to prime ministers near the ground-floor entrance. All of it is inside the free permanent collection.
Start at the top and work down. The gallery hangs its collection chronologically, so the top floor holds the oldest faces and the ground floor the newest, and walking it in that order turns the building into a single narrative of British history told through the people who lived it. There is a real pleasure in this arrangement that a thematically hung museum cannot offer: you walk out of the lift into the sixteenth century and you walk down through civil war, empire, industrial revolution and pop culture, and by the time you reach the exit you have physically descended through four hundred years of faces.
The Tudor rooms are the strongest in the building. Holbein's full-length cartoon for the lost Whitehall mural, the image that fixed how every English schoolchild pictures Henry VIII, hangs here alongside the coronation portraits of Elizabeth I and the faces of her court. The cartoon is a working drawing, pricked with holes so its outlines could be transferred onto the palace wall, and the mural it prepared burned long ago, which makes this drawing the closest surviving record of the most reproduced royal image in English history. It is a strange and slightly thrilling object: not a finished painting, but the ghost of one, made by the greatest portraitist ever to work in England.
The Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, in the early rooms nearby, has its own claim to fame. It is the only portrait of him with a plausible chain of provenance back to people who knew the sitter or his circle, and it is the image that has fed every later likeness of him, from the frontispiece engravings to the standard textbook picture. It draws a steady, quiet crowd of its own, and it is worth waiting your turn in front of.
The Victorian floor is where the collection thickens out. Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs, Lewis Carroll's portraits, and painted groups of the Pre-Raphaelite circle sit alongside the statesmen and scientists of the nineteenth century, and the hang rewards slow looking more than any other floor. Near the entrance, the contemporary displays carry the story to the present, with recent additions that include musicians, actors, activists and athletes, and the annual Taylor Wessing Photography Portrait Prize exhibition is the gallery's best-known temporary show, though that one usually carries a separate ticket.
If you want a guide rather than a self-directed wander, slots on the gallery's paid tours and exhibitions go first at weekends, and a booked option can save the queue for a timed exhibition.
Is Entry To The National Portrait Gallery Really Free?
Yes. Entry to the permanent collection is free, year-round, with no ticket needed for general admission, the same policy as the National Gallery next door and the Tate galleries across the river. What still costs money is the temporary exhibition programme: major ticketed shows, such as the photography prize exhibition, carry a separate charge, and advance booking is recommended for those. Under-18s are free or reduced for exhibitions too.
The free policy is worth stating plainly because it surprises visitors who arrive expecting a ticket barrier like the Tower of London's. The gallery is one of 20 free museums in the city profiled by London Museums, and like the rest of them it funds itself through a mix of government grant, donations and the paid exhibition programme. The Gift Aid convention applies here as it does across UK charity venues: you may see a higher suggested-donation figure quoted at the desk, and that is a voluntary donation wrapped into a price, not the standard admission, because there is no standard admission to pay.
What the free entry does not cover is the extras. Special exhibitions are priced individually and change several times a year, so check the current price on the museum's own site rather than carrying a figure from an older article. Guided tours and events are priced separately as well. None of this changes the core fact: the permanent collection, which is what most visitors come for and what this article covers, costs nothing to walk into.
There is a practical point hiding in the free policy too. Because there is no ticket revenue attached to general admission, the gallery has no commercial reason to hold you at the door, and the entry process is usually a simple walk-through. The queues that do form are for the ticketed exhibitions and for the cloakroom at peak times, not for the collection itself. That makes the gallery one of the easiest spontaneous visits in central London: you can decide to go on a whim, in the middle of a Trafalgar Square afternoon, without having built a booking into your plans a week earlier.
For busy periods and ticketed exhibitions, the gallery recommends advance booking, and that is the one situation where a booked slot earns its keep.
Which Tudor And Stuart Portraits Should You See First?
Go to the top floor first and head for Holbein's cartoon for the Whitehall mural, the full-length working drawing for Henry VIII's destroyed palace painting. Then find the coronation portraits of Elizabeth I, the Armada-related imagery around them, and the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare in the early Stuart rooms. Together these four stops are the densest half hour in the building.
The Holbein cartoon is the gallery's most important object by some distance. The mural it prepared once dominated the privy chamber at Whitehall Palace, and when that palace burned, the drawing survived while the painting did not, so this sheet of pricked outlines is now the primary witness to the most famous royal portrait composition in British history. It hangs with the Tudor dynastic portraits around it, and the room does something few museums manage: it shows you the moment a national iconography was invented. Before Holbein, English royal portraiture was stiff and generic; after him, the standing, legs-apart, glare-forward pose became the template that every later ruler's image answered to.
The Elizabeth I portraits tell the second half of that story. The gallery holds multiple images of her, including coronation portraits and later state images heavy with symbolic detail, and reading them in sequence shows how carefully her image was controlled through a long reign. The faces barely age while the symbolism thickens: pearls for virginity, globes and columns for empire, storms calmed at her command. A visitor who spends twenty minutes with these rooms comes away understanding something about propaganda that no textbook quite conveys, because the propaganda is hanging right there at eye level, four hundred years old and still working.
The Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, in the neighbouring rooms, is quieter but no less loaded. Its provenance traces back to people connected to the theatre world of his time, which is more than any rival claimant can say, and it has served as the seed image for nearly every depiction of him since. Around it sit the faces of the early Stuart court, the writers and adventurers of the first Elizabethan and Jacobean generations, and the hang makes the intellectual life of that era feel unexpectedly crowded and small, a world where the playwright, the explorer and the courtier all knew each other's faces.
A booked guided visit pulls these threads together far faster than the wall labels alone, and the gallery's own collection pages at the National Portrait Gallery's official site let you preview the hang before you go.
What Modern And Contemporary Highlights Are Worth Your Time?
The ground and first floors carry the collection from the twentieth century to now, and the standouts are the photographic portraits, the pop-era sitters, and the newest commissions that go up each year. The gallery actively collects living sitters, so the contemporary rooms change more often than anything else in the building, and the photography displays are the strongest single reason to revisit.
The modern galleries do not have one fixed star the way the Tudor floor does, and that is deliberate: the gallery commissions and acquires continuously, so the recent rooms are a rolling argument about who counts as significant right now. Musicians, film directors, scientists and activists hang within a few metres of each other, and the photography strand, running from early twentieth-century studio work to contemporary editorial portraiture, is arguably the best small photography collection in central London. A visitor who came five years ago will find a meaningfully different set of faces in these rooms today, and that turnover is the point: the gallery is not a mausoleum but a running record.
The photographic holdings deserve a special word. Because a portrait gallery's medium is the face rather than the brushstroke, photography sits at the centre of the collection rather than at its edge, and the displays move from formal studio sittings of the early 1900s through war reportage, fashion editorial and the informal celebrity portraits of recent decades. For anyone interested in the history of the medium, these rooms compress a century of photographic portraiture into a single walk, and they do it without charging a separate fee the way dedicated photography exhibitions elsewhere often do.
Visitors with an hour rather than a day should not feel obliged to climb to the top floor first. If your interest is contemporary culture rather than royal history, start at the entrance and work upward, and treat the Tudor rooms as the finale. The chronological hang works in both directions, and the gallery is small enough that either route fits comfortably inside a half-day. There is also a case for ending at the top rather than starting there: walking from the present back into the sixteenth century reverses the usual museum experience, and arriving at Holbein's cartoon last, after everything that came after it, makes the drawing feel less like a starting point and more like an origin.
How Long Should You Allow For A Visit?
Most visitors need about two hours for the permanent collection at a comfortable pace, or ninety minutes if they skip the photography rooms. Add another hour for a ticketed exhibition, and add queue time at peak periods even though general admission is free. The building is compact compared with the British Museum, so a full visit fits inside a morning or an afternoon without exhausting the day.
The honest answer depends on how you look at portraits. A portrait gallery rewards slow reading in a way a decorative-arts collection does not, because the point of each object is the sitter's story as much as the object itself. Two hours is enough for the chronological hang at a pace that lets you stop where the labels pull you. Visitors who want depth, meaning every label read and the temporary show included, should budget half a day. And there is a third category worth naming: the visitor who only came for one or two specific faces, the Shakespeare or the current prime minister, who can be in and out inside an hour and still feel the visit was complete.
| Visitor type | Time needed | What to prioritise |
|---|---|---|
| Quick highlight run | About an hour | Tudor floor, Chandos Shakespeare, one contemporary room |
| Standard visit | About two hours | Full chronological hang, top to bottom |
| Deep visit with labels | About three hours | Everything plus the photography displays |
| With a ticketed exhibition | Add about an hour | Exhibition first, then the permanent collection |
Timing matters more than duration. Weekday mornings are the quietest, weekends and holiday afternoons the busiest, and the free-admission policy means there is no price incentive to book a slot for the collection, only for exhibitions. If you are pairing the gallery with its neighbours, the National Gallery is literally next door and the Courtauld Gallery is a fifteen-minute walk across the river, so the area supports a full day of portraiture and painting without a second Tube journey. Families should note that the gallery is calmer and smaller than the big South Kensington museums, which makes it a good reset stop when the Natural History Museum's crowds have worn everyone down.
How Does The Gallery Compare With Nearby Alternatives?
The National Portrait Gallery's nearest rival is the National Gallery next door, which shows paintings as art rather than people as history, and the two make a natural pair. The Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House is the stronger single collection of portraits per square metre, but it charges admission, while the National Portrait Gallery does not. For modern art instead, Tate Modern sits a short walk over the river.
The distinction sounds abstract until you stand in both buildings on the same day. The National Gallery asks which painting is beautiful and important; the National Portrait Gallery asks who this person was and why someone paid to record their face. A Holbein in one building is a masterpiece of technique, and in the other it is evidence about a king. Visitors who only have time for one should choose by that question, and visitors with a full day should do both, since the doors are a minute's walk apart. The pairing also solves the lunch problem neatly, because Trafalgar Square puts you in the middle of Westminster's café and pub territory with no extra travel.
For portrait lovers specifically, the Courtauld is the deeper single-room experience, holding a dense run of Impressionist and Old Master portraits, but it is a paid venue with a smaller historical span. The National Portrait Gallery's advantage is reach: nowhere else in London covers a thousand years of British faces in one free building. If your day is built around art rather than history, our guide to the city's painting collections at the best art museums in London covers the wider route, and the question of whether the National Portrait Gallery is worth seeing gets a fuller treatment in its own piece.
There is one more comparison worth making, and it is the one visitors most often get wrong. The gallery is not a waxworks and not a hall of fame in the celebrity sense: it collects people who changed Britain, and the selection committee argues about each addition, which is why the contemporary rooms generate occasional public debate about who deserves a wall. That argument is part of the experience. You are meant to disagree with some of the choices, and the labels give you enough biography to know exactly why you disagree.
A guided option across the road covers the National Gallery's highlights if you want the pairing handled for you.
The gallery's practical details, opening hours and current exhibition programme are all published on the gallery's own visit pages, and those are the right source for anything time-sensitive.
Common Questions About The National Portrait Gallery
What are the best things to see at the National Portrait Gallery?
The Tudor galleries on the top floor, led by Holbein's cartoon for the Whitehall mural of Henry VIII and the coronation portraits of Elizabeth I, plus the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, the Brontë sisters' group portrait, and the contemporary and photographic displays near the entrance.
Is the National Portrait Gallery free to enter?
Yes, entry to the permanent collection is free year-round. Temporary exhibitions, tours and events are priced separately, and advance booking is recommended for the ticketed shows.
How long does a visit to the National Portrait Gallery take?
About two hours for the permanent collection at a comfortable pace, or three if you read the labels closely. Add roughly an hour for a ticketed exhibition.
Where is the National Portrait Gallery located?
On St Martin's Place in Westminster, directly behind the National Gallery and a minute's walk from Trafalgar Square. The nearest Tube stations are Charing Cross and Leicester Square.
Do I need to book tickets in advance?
Not for the permanent collection, which is free to enter. Advance booking is recommended for temporary exhibitions and for busy periods, and a booked slot is the way to skip the queue for a ticketed show.