My favourite National Gallery masterpiece by Prue Leith, Simon Schama and more – but do you agree?

Next month, to celebrate its 200th anniversary, the National Gallery in London is dispatching a dozen of its most popular paintings to venues around the UK. Constable’s The Hay Wain, for example, is trundling off to Bristol; while the Rokeby Venus by Velázquez will bare all in Liverpool; and Caravaggio’s staggering 1601 masterpiece, The Supper at Emmaus, is crossing the Irish Sea to Belfast. 

What is it about these 12 pictures in particular – which the gallery is describing as its “National Treasures” – that has earned them a place in our cultural consciousness? 

Below, famous art lovers – from an ex-Python to a former Archbishop – single out their favourite work and attempt to get to the nub of its appeal. 

Simon Schama

Historian

Selection

Self-Portrait at the Age of 34

See it

Brighton Museum & Art Gallery

The ultimate show-off: miller’s son from provincial Leiden makes it in Amsterdam and is in demand as no Dutch painter before him. He’s a proper burgher, too, swathed in finery, striking a pose borrowed from Titian, in whose company he places himself. You can see why: the paint hand­l­ing is sumptuous; no one does the fabric of life more richly.

He’s Rembrandt and this is also why we love him; the mask of success barely covers that sidelong look, which knows all things – including fame, money, love and life – are fleeting. So we had better make the best of it. Which, by God, he does.

Prue Leith

Cookery writer and broadcaster

See it

The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

This painting is such fun: Venus is wearing a dead sexy dress, but one that looks impossible to get out of, with bondage-like braids outlining her breasts. She is beautiful, young, in control and faintly bored. She’s taking no notice of her naked lover, Mars, stretched out, snoring in (presumably) post-coital exhaustion.

Both seem unaware of the cherub-like satyrs, playing with Mars’s armour. One has nicked his helmet, a couple have his lance, and a fourth is trying to wake him by blowing a conch in his face. Wonderful!

Michael Palin

Actor and writer

Selection

The Fighting Temeraire

See it

Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle

I grew up with a copy of this picture, on a wall at home. I always saw it as an image of British maritime glory. Now, I see it as more sad than triumphal. The huge warship did indeed have its moment of glory at Trafalgar. More than 30 years later, it’s being towed to the breaker’s yard.

Turner captures the nobility of a great ship whose days are over. Its sails are furled; all that is moving it through the water is a tug, black and functional. The tug represents the future; the Temeraire, a past that is rapidly disappearing. This magnificent painting is one of the finest depictions of the passing of an age.

Chantal Joffe

Artist

Selection

Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria

See it

Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

Painter

Artemisia Gentileschi

Artemisia looks at us, not happy or sad but thoughtful. By painting herself as the martyr St Catherine, she is alluding to her own rape and the trial that followed.

During that trial, they tortured Artemisia to make her reveal the truth, and she cried out: “I have told the truth and I always will, because it is true and I am here to confirm it wherever necessary.” This painting is another form of testimony to that – and to her survival. Here, she is still shouting her truth.

Rowan Williams

Former Archbishop of Canterbury

Selection

The Supper at Emmaus

See it at

Ulster Museum, Belfast

The whole composition bursts out towards us: Christ’s extended hand seems disconcertingly out of alignment with the overall perspective; the disciple on the right bridges the gap between us and Jesus, one hand reaching to touch him, the other pulling us in. Even the basket of fruit balanced on the table’s edge seems about to spill over (with two trailing withies intertwining in the shape of the ancient Christian symbolic fish).

With violent but arrested motion, this is a picture of the gap between lightning and the sound of thunder; the silence of revelation breaking.

Bettany Hughes

Historian

Selection

The Toilet of Venus

See it at

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

As a student, I had a dog-eared postcard of this painting above my bed. I’ve always been fascinated by the ancient goddess of pleasure and pain, of war and of sex. A ferocious creature with roots in the Middle East, Venus is no soft, pretty pin-up.

This painting roused the ire of the suffragette Mary Richardson, who walked into the National Gallery in 1914 and slashed at the artwork in protest, because of the way “men gawped at it all day long”. The cut marks are still visible. The Rokeby Venus reminds us of both the benign and malign power of beauty.

Jeremy Vine

TV and radio presenter

See it at

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery

I grew up with this painting hanging above the fireplace in our house in Cheam, Surrey. My earliest memories have The Hay Wain in them. It was the middle-class equivalent of the “tennis bottom” Athena poster, in that it was everywhere. Unlike that poster, it did not suggest any disturbance to the natural order. It was the opp­o­site; prob­ably the most conservative scene ever painted.

As a boy, I was shocked when I vis­ited a friend’s home and found that his parents, too, had The Hay Wain. It raised the frightening poss­ibility that the painting above our fireplace was not, in fact, the original.

Tracy Chevalier

Novelist

Selection

Lady Standing at a Virginal

See it at

National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh

This is one of only 36 known works by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Already that makes it special for being so rare. It is also one of just a handful of his paintings in which the subject looks directly at the viewer.

The woman stands anchored at her instrument, regarding us, her gaze mirrored in Cupid’s bold stare from the painting above her. They pin us to the spot, daring us to study the exquisitely rendered details: the gleaming pearls around her neck, the folds of her silk skirt, the dots of light on her sleeve. It is a glorious study of light, shadow and stillness.

Frank Cottrell-Boyce

Novelist and screenwriter

See it at

Leicester Museum & Art Gallery

I’ve shared this picture with groups of primary schoolchildren on hundreds of joyful occasions (because there’s a chapter about it in my children’s book Framed). They always find their way into it immediately. Partly because the figures in the foreground are looking straight out at them – as in a selfie. A selfie with a lot of photobombers.

We sometimes talk about how carefully formal the apparent jumble of umbrellas is. But what really gets them is the fact that this is a picture of a miserable event – city rain – yet it swings with action and happiness, because people are sharing their brollies. Helping you find beauty in something banal – that’s what art is really for.

Janina Ramirez

Historian

Selection

The Wilton Diptych

See it at

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

There are few more personal artworks than The Wilton Diptych. We know exactly whom it was made for: King Richard II. When he prayed in front of it, he would see himself in the same pose, kneeling alongside a host of heaven’s good and great.

His ego would have soared: depicted beside him are John the Baptist and England’s finest saints, Edward the Confessor and Edmund the Martyr. In front, the baby Jesus leans over, recognising his kingship, while Mary and an army of angels all wear Richard’s livery of the white hart. This is divine kingship in extremis.

Conrad Shawcross

Artist

Selection

The Water-Lily Pond

See it at

York Art Gallery

It is easy to perceive Monet’s work through the lens of traditional painting. But like all originals, he was once at the vanguard of experimentation. Scientists and artists share the goal of trying to see more than what is visible, employing ingenious techniques to go beyond the perception envelope and build a picture from the shadows.

Monet, despite his painterly guise, worked in this logical, didactic way, repeating the same experiment each evening, obsessively recording the same lily pads in the same conditions save for one variable – the day itself. In this way, he was able to look past the real and glimpse something sublime.

Katie Derham

Broadcaster

Selection

The Stonemason’s Yard

See it at

National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth

This great painting is no postcard. It’s a view of Venice’s Grand Canal, but only in the background. The location of the yard is where we would now find the Accademia Bridge – but instead of tourists and mask shops, we have a dusty, busy industrial space, full of everyday working life.

There’s a child who has fallen over; people shouting out of windows; and, if you look closely, the most fantastic selection of potted plants on a balcony. Yes, there is still some beautiful architecture, but it’s all a bit shabby, a ­little faded. It’s a perfectly executed glimpse into the real ­Venice of the time.

The National Gallery’s National Treasures will be on show at various venues around the UK (national gallery.org.uk), from May 10

Unless otherwise noted, all images © The National Gallery, London