Constable's 1821 cart crossing the Stour at Flatford is the national self-image: working countryside painted with such devotion it became what 'England' looks like in the mind's eye.

Gainsborough paints a young couple beside their Suffolk acres, c.1750 — half portrait, half land deed. Nobody has skewered property, class and countryside in one canvas better.

Constable's 1831 storm over the spire, arched by a rainbow, was painted in grief after his wife's death — the English landscape carrying a man's whole inner weather.

Holman Hunt's 1852 strayed sheep wander an unguarded Sussex cliff in Pre-Raphaelite hyper-detail — a sunlit landscape doubling as a jab at an undefended, drifting England.

Millais sets a blind beggar girl beneath a double rainbow she cannot see, 1856 — Victorian social conscience and radiant English weather held in one aching frame.

Leader's 1881 flooded lane at dusk — mud, bare elms and wet gold light — proved the British were sentimental about drizzle: the nation's weather made lovable in oils.

John Nash painted this ripening Buckinghamshire field in 1918, straight from the trenches — harvest geometry as recovery, the land as the thing worth coming home to.

Paul Nash's 1930 beeches on the Chilterns turn English trees into cool modernist geometry — the ancient landscape and the machine age agreeing, for once, on a picture.

Ravilious paints England from a third-class carriage in 1939: the Westbury white horse framed by the compartment window — the whole gentle country glimpsed in passing.

David Inshaw's 1972 deep-summer garden — two women, a floating shuttlecock, monumental trees — distils the English idyll into something dreamlike, still and slightly uncanny.

Turner's 1839 Trafalgar veteran, towed to the breakers by a grubby steam tug at sunset, was voted the nation's favourite painting — an empire's elegy in one long last light.

Turner's 1842 steam-boat vanishing in a vortex of sea and snow — he claimed sailors lashed him to the mast to see it. True or not, nobody has painted weather more violently.

Turner's only royal commission, 1824: the Victory at close quarters, rigging, smoke and dying light — the navy's defining hour as a national epic, now at Greenwich.

Millais, 1870: an old sailor points west and two boys listen, spellbound — the empire recruiting its next generation through sea stories, painted at the height of its confidence.

Stanhope Forbes's Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach, 1885, painted in the open air at Newlyn — wet sand, grey light and working lives, the British coast without a drop of varnish.

Steer's girls running down the Suffolk pier in evening light, c.1894 — British Impressionism's happiest moment, all salt air, long shadows and childhood in motion.

Constable takes the rural eye to the modern seaside, 1827: the new pleasure pier under a huge working sky — the British holiday coast at the moment of its invention.

Alfred Wallis, a St Ives fisherman who took up painting at 67 on scraps of card, painted ships as memory, not perspective — and taught British modernism how to see simply.

Lowry's 1963 sea has no ships, no figures, no shore — just grey water meeting grey sky. The painter of crowds facing the emptiest picture in British art, and one of the bleakest.

Maggi Hambling's vast North Sea waves, painted after watching storms at Aldeburgh, keep the Turner tradition alive — the island's sea still breaking over British canvas.

The Venetian master spent nine years painting London — his Thames from Somerset House, c.1750, gave the smoky commercial city a Venetian glamour it never forgot.

Turner watched the Houses of Parliament burn from a boat in 1834 and painted the inferno twice — the old constitution going up in the most spectacular flames in British art.

Whistler's Old Battersea Bridge, c.1875, dissolves industrial Thames into blue fog and falling gold — the painting that put 'art for art's sake' on trial when Ruskin attacked it.

Monet crossed the Channel to paint Westminster through fog, working on dozens of canvases at once as the light shifted — London's dirty air made luminous by a French eye.

Atkinson Grimshaw's 1881 gaslit street — wet pavement, shop windows, moonlight through smoke — made the northern industrial city at night into poetry nobody else attempted.

Derain painted the working Thames in riotous Fauvist colour in 1906 — tugs in scarlet and viridian — proving even London's docks could blaze, given a French palette.

Charles Ginner's 1912 Piccadilly — buses, adverts and a flower seller, painted in thick deliberate strokes — the modern city's noise and signage taken seriously as a subject.

Niels Møller Lund's 1904 rooftop panorama — St Paul's rising from the smoke of the City — named itself without blushing: London as the centre of the world, painted at the apex.

Auerbach has painted the same few Camden streets for seventy years, scraping down and repainting until the city's weight lives in the paint — London as lifelong obsession.

Kossoff painted Hawksmoor's great church again and again in churning impasto — a London-born son of immigrants wrestling the city's grandest survivor onto canvas, 1990.

Legs planted, shoulders padded, eyes forward — Holbein's Henry VIII invented the power portrait. The Whitehall mural burned, but the NPG cartoon and copies fixed the king forever.

Elizabeth I, hand on the globe, storm wrecking the Armada behind her, c.1588 — by an unknown English hand, it is propaganda perfected: the queen as an icon beyond time.

Holbein's 1533 double portrait of French envoys at Henry VIII's court — globes, lutes, learning — with a smeared skull hidden in anamorphosis: power and mortality in one frame.

Van Dyck painted the king from three angles in 1635 so Bernini could carve a bust in Rome — elegance in triplicate, from the reign that ended on a scaffold.

Gainsborough dressed a boy in a century-old Van Dyck costume, c.1770, and painted bravura blue satin — sold to California in 1921, it caused national mourning at the docks.

The Reverend Robert Walker glides across Duddingston Loch, c.1795 — Enlightenment Edinburgh in one image: reason, kirk and grace in balance. Attribution to Raeburn is still debated.

Hogarth's market seller, c.1745, painted loose and laughing decades ahead of its time — the common face of London given the vitality most reserved for duchesses.

A life-size racehorse rearing on a bare gold ground, 1762 — no rider, no landscape, no owner. Stubbs made a horse the grandest portrait sitter in British art.

Hockney's 1971 portrait of Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell with Percy the cat — a cool, modern marriage in a Notting Hill flat, regularly voted among Britain's favourite paintings.

Six by nine inches of heavy impasto, 2001 — Freud painted the Queen as he painted everyone: unflattered, monumental, mortal. The row it caused proved the portrait's honesty.

Two near-identical ladies sit bolt upright in bed holding two near-identical babies, c.1610, by an unknown hand — British art's strangest, most hypnotic family riddle.

Delaroche's 1833 Execution of Lady Jane Grey — the blindfolded nine-days queen groping for the block — is French melodrama about English history, and the crowds never leave it.

Yeames's 1878 'And when did you last see your father?' — a Royalist boy questioned by Parliamentarians — turned the Civil War into a moral dilemma every viewer must answer.

Wallis's 1856 dead poet in a garret — arsenic bottle, dawn over St Paul's, seventeen years old — minted the myth of doomed genius that British culture has retold ever since.

Painted flower by flower on the Hogsmill in 1852, with Lizzie Siddal freezing in a bathtub for the figure — Shakespeare's drowned Ophelia became Britain's best-loved tragedy in oils.

Waterhouse's 1888 lady loosing the chain and drifting to Camelot under her curse — Tennyson's poem made image, and the postcard Britain's museums can never print enough of.

Burne-Jones's 1884 King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid — a crowned king sitting at a barefoot girl's feet — medieval legend as a quiet manifesto: love outranks rank.

Landseer's 1851 twelve-point stag in Highland mist became the most reproduced animal in art — whisky labels, biscuit tins, shortbread — Scotland's brand image, for better and worse.

Leighton's 1895 sleeper in molten orange, once sold for £50 when Victorian art was unfashionable — now, from Puerto Rico, the era's most adored image of beauty at rest.

Ford Madox Brown's 1855 emigrant couple, grim-faced on deck as the white cliffs recede — the island story's other half: the millions who left, painted without a shred of glamour.

Wright of Derby's 1768 Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump — candlelit faces watching science decide a cockatoo's fate — the Enlightenment as domestic drama, painted in the Midlands.

Wright of Derby again, 1772: a founder's family lit by white-hot iron — industry as the new sublime, and the working family placed where saints used to stand.

De Loutherbourg's 1801 Shropshire furnaces torching the night sky — the Industrial Revolution's birthplace painted as glorious inferno, awe and alarm in equal measure.

Turner's 1844 train bursting over Maidenhead viaduct through golden rain — a hare racing the engine — the machine age arriving at full speed into English weather and winning.

Thirteen years in the making, Brown's Work (1852–65) puts Hampstead navvies centre-canvas with idlers, thinkers and the poor around them — Victorian labour given an altarpiece.

William Bell Scott's 1861 Tyneside mural — hammers mid-swing, a girl with a lunch pail, an Armstrong gun — the industrial North East painting itself as the modern epic it was.

Eyre Crowe, 1874: mill girls at ease on a sunlit wall, clogs, shawls and gossip — factory England at rest, painted with a documentary respect rare for its century.

Fildes's 1891 physician keeping a lamplit vigil over a sick child — painted from the artist's own loss — became medicine's defining image and, later, an unofficial NHS icon.

Stanley Spencer's wartime series from Port Glasgow, 1940–46 — welders and riveters tangled in cable like figures in a sacred fresco — industrial labour painted as devotion.

Lowry's 1955 panorama of chimneys, terraces and drifting crowds compresses the industrial North into one imagined city — the world millions actually lived in, finally on gallery walls.

Hogarth's 1743 six-part satire of a marriage arranged for money and ended by scandal — British art discovering it could tell stories, sell prints and skewer society at once.

Wilkie's 1822 veterans reading the Waterloo dispatch outside a pub — joy rippling through a London crowd — needed a rail to hold back its first viewers at the Academy.

Frith's 1854 beach — bathing machines, minstrels, bored children, sunshades — sold to Queen Victoria and invented the crowded panorama of the British seaside holiday.

Frith's 1858 racecourse epic — acrobats, pickpockets, toffs, gypsies and gamblers — all England out for the day on one canvas, and the Victorian blockbuster perfected.

Tissot's 1874 society dance under strings of flags — a Frenchman in London painting the Season with an outsider's eye for its beauty, boredom and repetition.

Herkomer's 1885 labourer resting on a verge, family huddled beside the road — unemployment painted life-size and unromantic, Victorian Britain's conscience on canvas.

A Camden couple in the same room and separate worlds, c.1914 — his cigar, her stare at the wall — British painting's most devastating portrait of a marriage gone silent.

Edward Burra's 1930 ham-slicing counterman and lone customer under electric light — London's late-night caff painted with relish, decades before anyone called it iconic.

Norman Cornish spent thirty years down Durham pits and painted his own world — miners walking the pit road home under telegraph poles — everyday dignity, from the inside.

Lowry's 1953 crowd converging on Burnden Park — bought decades later by the footballers' union for a record sum — the working week's reward, painted as pilgrimage.

Benjamin West broke the rules in 1770 by painting General Wolfe dying at Quebec in modern uniform, arranged like a pietà — the imperial martyr image every war picture since answers.

Maclise's vast 1865 mural in Parliament packs the Victory's chaotic deck around the falling admiral — the nation's naval martyrdom installed at the heart of its politics.

Lady Butler's 1881 Scots Greys charging head-on out of the canvas at Waterloo — painted by a woman barred from battle, and more thrilling than anything painted by men who weren't.

Butler again, 1879: assistant surgeon Brydon, sole survivor of 16,000, slumping into Jalalabad on a dying horse — imperial catastrophe painted without a single excuse.

A line of blinded soldiers, hands on shoulders, led through the aftermath of a mustard attack, 1919 — Sargent's frieze of the Great War's pity, twenty feet of it.

Paul Nash's 'We Are Making a New World', 1918 — sunrise over shattered mud and splintered trees — the war's most savage title attached to its most beautiful desolation.

Nevinson's 1917 two dead Tommies face-down in the wire — banned by the censor, exhibited anyway with a brown paper strip reading 'censored' — truth versus the official war.

John Nash painted the 1917 Welsh Ridge counter-attack from memory — men climbing from a snowy ditch into fire. He was one of twelve survivors of eighty. The snow stays white.

Paul Nash, 1941: the Channel coast under a sky laced with contrails and falling smoke — the decisive air battle painted as weather, pattern and national deliverance.

John Piper painted the cathedral the morning after the Blitz destroyed it, ruins still smoking — witness turned elegy, and the seed of Britain's great post-war rebuilding symbol.

Blake's 1794 creator leaning from the sun with golden compasses — visionary printmaking as cosmic cinema, and the image Blake himself coloured on his deathbed.

Newton crouches naked on the ocean floor, measuring with compasses, blind to the glory behind him — Blake's 1795 warning that reason without imagination sees only the diagram.

Fuseli's 1781 incubus squatting on a sleeper's chest, mare's head through the curtains — Gothic horror invented in a London studio, endlessly parodied within Fuseli's own lifetime.

Samuel Palmer's blossom exploding over a Kent garden path, c.1830 — the visionary years when a Blake disciple painted an English valley as paradise barely containing itself.

John Martin's 1853 Great Day of His Wrath hurls mountains and cities into the abyss — Victorian apocalypse as blockbuster spectacle, toured like a fairground attraction.

Holman Hunt's lantern-bearing Christ knocking at a weed-choked door became the most travelled religious image of its age — a later version toured the empire to two million viewers.

A blindfolded figure on a globe, bending to hear one unbroken string, 1886 — Watts's Hope consoled Victorians, inspired a young Obama's pastor, and named a famous sermon and speech.

Richard Dadd painted The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke over nine years in Bethlem asylum — a grass-blade universe of obsessive detail around one axe-stroke that never falls.

Stanley Spencer raises the dead gently from his village churchyard, 1927 — no trumpets, just Cookham neighbours climbing from graves into sunshine. Heaven as a Thames-side Thursday.

Chris Ofili's 1998 portrait of a weeping woman — each tear holding Stephen Lawrence's face — grief, faith and protest fused into modern Britain's most moving devotional image.

Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944 — orange grounds, screaming mutations — announced post-war British art with a scream the country recognised.

Ben Nicholson's 1943–45 window view layers a toy-like harbour behind cool abstract still life — Cornish light disciplining international modernism into something quietly British.

Peter Blake's 1957 children hold royal portraits amid badges, magazines and cigarette packets — Pop art arriving in Britain with a scrapbook of the nation's actual stuff.

Bridget Riley's 1961 black-and-white squares compressing toward a fold made the canvas physically vibrate — British Op art conquering the optic nerve itself.

Hockney's 1967 California pool — flat sun, empty chair, frozen splash — a Bradford painter's cool dream of elsewhere that became the most famous British painting of its era.

Richard Hamilton screenprints Mick Jagger handcuffed in a police van after the 1967 drug bust — Pop art as instant history, the Sixties' collision of celebrity, law and flashbulb.

Freud's 1995 nude of Sue Tilley asleep on a battered sofa — flesh painted with total honesty — later set the auction record for a living artist and reset portraiture's courage.

Jenny Saville's monumental 1992 self-portrait, mirrored feminist text scratched across the paint, made a young British woman the record-priced living female artist — scale as argument.

Banksy's stencilled girl releasing a heart balloon began on a South Bank wall — then half-shredded itself at auction in 2018, becoming Love is in the Bin and Britain's best art joke.

Hockney's 2007 winter copse — fifty canvases, forty feet, the largest painting he ever made, given to Tate — the oldest British subject, the green land, repainted at frontier scale. The Hay Wain's great-grandchild.