The Tate collection includes British art from the 16th century to today as well as modern and contemporary art from around the world. It is held by four galleries: Tate Britain and Tate Modern, both in London; Tate Liverpool; and Tate St. Ives. To see all 31 of these paintings will require a trip around England. The artworks in the Tate collection have been created by a far more diverse group of artists and present a wider range of perspectives than appear in this list.

Earlier versions of the descriptions of these paintings first appeared in 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die, edited by Stephen Farthing (2018). Writers’ names appear in parentheses.

10pm Saturday (2012)

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye was born in London in 1977 to Ghanaian parents. Twenty years later, she left the capital to study at Falmouth College of Art, before returning in 2000 to spend three postgraduate years painting at the Royal Academy Schools. After completing her art school training, Yiadom-Boakye had to fund her painting by taking on a range of jobs, including working as a phone tester at a cell phone recycling plant. In 2006 she won an award from a British charity, The Arts Foundation, that enabled her to paint full time. She was shortlisted for the 2013 Turner Prize on the strength of her solo exhibition of traditional portraits, Extracts and Verses, at Chisenhale Gallery. Although 10pm Saturday seems to emerge from ground first laid by Édouard Manet, then Edgar Degas and Walter Richard Sickert, her paintings are neither painted from life nor from a photograph. 10pm Saturday gives the impression that it is based on an image that originated in street photography—a photo taken quickly on a mobile phone one night while walking down a dimly lit street in search of the next bar. The young man in the red striped shirt is, however, like all Yiadom-Boakye’s figures, an invention. At a technical level, her portraits are each, like the portraits of Alex Katz and Chantal Joffe, the product of a single day’s work. When asked why, she will tell you that coming back to a work never improves it. Her portraits were the subject of a solo show at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 2015; she has works in the London collections of the Tate Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum. (Stephen Farthing)

Painting 150 (1961)

Born in the Canary Islands, Manolo Millares was self-taught and one of the founding members of the avant-garde group El Paso (“The Step”). He is also associated with the Informalists, a group of artists who believed that art should be removed from theory and concept. Millares is perhaps most famous for his collages, in which he uses materials such as sand, newspaper, ceramics, wood, and fabric; his particular method of tearing, bunching, tying, and stitching his materials together helped establish him as a leading international artist. Affected by the bloody and bitter period of the Spanish Civil War, he became fascinated by the polar opposites of destruction and construction. In the 1940s he was influenced by the work of the Surrealists, notably Paul Klee, and Millares began producing fantastic pictograms. Until the mid-1960s he employed a particularly austere and limited color palette, creating images that, although abstract, often evoked some kind of human entity. He was fascinated with the idea of the homunculus, the miniature human being that can represent man in a primitive state. This theme appeared in his paintings after 1958, including Painting 150. Painted in blacks, beiges, browns, and blues, the painting provides a great contrast to the more colorful work produced by Millares in his later years. The viewer can just about discern a figure, arms stretched out, suspended in the depths of black despair. Painting 150 embodies Millares’s ideas of destruction and construction, and it is among the artist’s most celebrated works. (Aruna Vasudevan)

Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970–71)

Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy by David Hockney is one of a series of double portraits of the artist’s famous friends made during the 1970s. Critics have remarked on Hockney’s ability to appeal to viewers’ escapist instincts; the Los Angeles swimming pools series and the celebrity portraits share this characteristic. Along with The Room, Manchester Street, this is the only explicit picture of London that Hockney painted before he moved to California. In this work, the furnishings, the view through the balcony, and the muted light in the picture establish the sense of place. Hockney’s own comments on the painting suggest that achieving the quality of light was his main concern; he worked both from life and from a series of photographs to achieve the desired effect. Leaving behind the stylistic devices of his previous works, which draw attention to the status of his subjects as pictures, the artist here returns to a more traditional style. The couple’s formal poses and their relationship to one another in the room reinforce the reference to 18th- and 19th-century portraiture. However, on close examination of Hockney’s treatment of large areas of the canvas, the viewer finds that the artist has abstracted the room’s background surfaces while paying significant attention to detail in his subjects’ faces, the telephone, and the vase of flowers. It would be a mistake to take this work as an example of simple, realistic naturalism; here, Hockney is experimenting with new ways of constructing and painting the portrait. (Alix Rule)

Quattro Stagioni: Primavera (1993–95)

When the American Abstract artist Cy Twombly settled permanently in Rome in 1959, he moved away from his close association with the New York art scene. In doing so, he succeeded in creating his own personal art, which earned him a reputation as one of the greatest artists of the second half of the 20th century. Twombly exhibited his works at the Venice Biennale in 1964, and four years later the Milwaukee Art Center hosted his first retrospective—the first in a long series organized by the greatest museums around the world. In 1995 the architect Renzo Piano designed the Cy Twombly Gallery of The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. This collection holds dozens of Twombly’s art works—not only paintings, but also sculptures, drawings, and other works on paper dating from 1953 to 1994. Twombly executed this painting at a point when he was already an internationally celebrated artist. Primavera is a work from a series entitled Quattro Stagioni. Instead of providing the viewer with a traditional representation of the season of rebirth, he has created an ambiguous image in which the sensuous colors are as peaceful as they are violent. Twombly’s early graphic style can be observed here in the numerous inscriptions of random words all over the painting, and the act of painting itself is a theme that he revisited throughout his career. (Julie Jones)

1943–45 (St. Ives, Cornwall) (1943–45)

Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, British artist Ben Nicholson moved to the small Cornish fishing community of St. Ives, England. His Cubist-inspired still lifes and geometrical reliefs had brought him success, and, by the late 1930s, he had secured his place as a leading figure in avant-garde European art. That decade had seen his work become increasingly abstract, but his move to the coast sparked another change in direction when he once again turned his attention to the British landscape. It was a more lucrative subject matter, particularly at a time of heightened wartime patriotism and isolation from the forward-looking world of European art. The clear Cornish light, the geometry of the flat-faced fishermen’s cottages, and the blocky colors of the sea and sand made up his working environment. In this painting, one of a series begun in 1939, a harbor scene of boats and rooftops is viewed through a still life arranged on a windowsill. The geometric shapes embody his fascination with the positioning of objects in space. The flattened forms also demonstrate an interest in naive and primitive art. Completed in 1945, the work includes a Union Jack in the foreground. Primarily a celebration of V-E Day, the flag hints at the new and optimistic era following the end of the war. Although influenced by Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Henri Rousseau, and other significant figures of European art, Nicholson found a personal, distinctly British take on Modernism. He was also personally committed to encouraging emerging artists of the period. (Jessica Bishop)

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Seashore with Boats (c. 1808)

John Sell Cotman was born the son of a shopkeeper in the bustling market town of Norwich, England. He traveled to London in 1798 to further his artistic training, and he was swiftly immersed in the active art circles of the time. Although he never received much in the way of formal training, he quickly became one of the leading watercolorists working in the city. He returned to the Norwich area around 1804 and immediately became integral to the Norwich school of painting, which was less a school and more of a provincial movement of art formed by a group of largely self-taught artists. The artists of the Norwich school focused on the landscape and seascape of their local area, although they also drew inspiration from other areas of natural beauty. Seashore with Boats is one of Cotman’s relatively few works in oil, and it is thought to be of Cromer Beach north of Norwich. In 1809, shortly after this work was completed, the artist married Anne Miles, who lived close to that beach. Over the following year he exhibited four subjects inspired by this area. The work is particularly distinctive by its broad areas of flat color with bold forms that create a pattern effect across the surface. Seashore with Boats was a piece typical of his style that was startlingly modern in concept for its time, and it would seem to anticipate the works of Paul Nash. Though Cotman was relatively little known during his time, he enjoyed a huge revival during the 20th century that saw his work equal—if not surpass—that of J.M.W. Turner in popularity. (Tamsin Pickeral)

Harbour Window with Two Figures: St. Ives: July 1950 (1950)

There have been a few artists in history who have also been active art critics. Producing art may give a critic a more empathetic and intimate understanding of the art that he or she views. However, evaluating other artists’ work can also be a problem for someone who is primarily an artist. English artist Patrick Heron wrote about art for the New English Weekly, New York’s Nation and Arts, and the British political magazine the New Statesman from 1945 to 1958. In these publications, he questioned the necessity for reducing form to pure abstraction. Instead, during this part of his career, he was trying to synthesize his admiration for painters like Henri Matisse and Georges Braque. Heron’s intellectual relationship with art can be seen in this work. Stiffer and less harmonious than his later abstract work, this Cubist painting of a nude model standing by a window nevertheless shows Heron’s sensitive understanding of form and graceful handling of difficult color combinations. The key relationship in this composition is between orange or yellow and royal blue, yet Heron tempers this potentially overwhelming contrast with great reserve. The effect successfully recalls Matisse. Heron’s early canvases are perhaps too overtly intellectual. In these, one can observe him struggling with abstraction and trying to put his love of Cubism to use. But once he broke from this style and delved fully into abstraction, he was able to balance his appreciation for art with his own ability to produce some of England’s most beautiful and direct paintings. (Ana Finel Honigman)

Pencerrig (1772)

Pencerrig was the Welsh family estate of Thomas Jones, who was to have followed the typical path of a landowner’s younger son and trained for the church. However, the money for this was unavailable, and he turned instead to landscape painting. The ability to sketch and paint was regarded at the time as an accomplished pastime for members of genteel families. Although Jones painted professionally, he still remained something of a “gentleman painter,” recording views in Naples on his version of the Grand Tour undertaken by many contemporary young aristocrats. This painting of a view of his family’s estate was produced on a holiday there in 1772. The scale of his painting is surprisingly small, yet the colors are rich and deep, showing bright skies and solid banks of clouds whose forms echo the mountains and fields below. The vibrant colors and specific composition of the clouds indicate a work painted outside in the open air. This was unusual for oil paintings at the time; it was only because he was working on such a small, transportable scale that the artist was able to paint in this method outdoors, yet it enabled Jones to convey a timeless immediacy and freshness. At a time when landowners chose to have quasi-portraits of their estates painted by professionals, Jones created an innovative, intimate record of the landscape associated with his family, rather than of his house and garden. Jones eventually inherited the estate and died there in 1803. (Serena Cant)

Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (c. 1842)

J.M.W. Turner’s increasingly experimental work drew heavy criticism during the 1840s, and this painting was damned by some critics as “soapsuds and whitewash.” Influential contemporary art critic John Ruskin, however, who was Turner’s great champion, loved it. The famous tale attached to Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth is that Turner had himself lashed to the mast of the steamboat Ariel that appears in the picture while it crashed about in a sea storm. This story seems unlikely, but it accurately reflects the artist’s passion for getting inside the heart of the natural world. Viewers of this painting are sucked rapidly into the vortex-shaped composition that was much used by Turner, and the careering compositional lines induce giddy disorientation and chaos, true to the subject matter. This is an unusually subjective picture for Turner’s day, and the fairly limited color palette and crazily merging swaths of water and light evoke a dreamlike state. Despite this, Turner is in control of every well-observed element—only he, with his knowledge of color and light, would recall that the fires burning below deck need to be shown in that lemon-yellow shade created by looking through a curtain of snow. At the vortex’s epicenter, a steamboat is tossed about perilously, used symbolically as in his Fighting Temeraire, but here specifically reflecting Turner’s belief that humankind is helpless at the mercy of nature’s vast forces. Turner apparently said of this work: “I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like.” (Ann Kay)

Ophelia (1851–52)

This is one of the most popular Pre-Raphaelite paintings, produced when the youthful enthusiasm of the group was at its peak. Its painstaking attention to detail and love of poetic symbolism were characteristic traits of their style. Shakespeare was a favorite source of inspiration for all the Pre-Raphaelites. Here, John Everett Millais depicts a scene from Hamlet, where Ophelia throws herself into a river and drowns after her father has been killed by Hamlet. Shakespeare had emphasized the plight of his deranged heroine by describing how she garlanded herself with a variety of flowers, each of which had appropriate, symbolic associations. Millais followed this lead, portraying the blooms with botanical accuracy and adding examples from the Victorian language of flowers. Among others, he included pansies (love in vain), violets (fidelity), nettles (pain), daisies (innocence), pheasant’s eyes (sorrow), forget-me-nots and poppies (death). This final association is also suggested by the outline of a skull, formed by the foliage on the right. It refers not only to Ophelia’s death, but also to the graveyard scene which followed it, featuring Hamlet with Yorick’s skull. Millais’s obsession with accuracy was not limited to the flowers. He spent four months working on the background, at a spot near the Hogsmill River in Surrey, England. The model, too, was obliged to suffer for his art. She was Lizzie Siddall, Dante Rossetti’s future wife. For weeks on end, she posed in a bath full of water, heated from below by a number of lamps. (Iain Zaczek)

The Awakening Conscience (1853)

As a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, William Holman Hunt painted one of the defining images of Victorian Christianity, The Light of the World, which became a popular print. The Awakening Conscience is Hunt’s own response to his earlier painting. The young woman looks up and starts forward suddenly—her posture indicates that she has done so in response to something she has seen or heard from outside. At first glance this is a scene of domesticity in comfortable surroundings. Such intimacy between man and woman is rare in Victorian painting, yet among all her rings her wedding finger is bare. She is a “kept woman,” a mistress. All around her are symbols of her entrapment—the clock under its glass, the bird trapped by the cat—and of her wasted life—the unfinished tapestry, the music for “Tears, Idle Tears” on the floor. She turns to a world outside the house she is imprisoned in, a happier world, seen in the shaft of sunlight falling on the bottom right corner of the painting, and which is reflected in the mirror behind. She has “seen the light.” This painting is a direct expression of mid-Victorian religious revivalism that swept across all sections of the Church of England, yet the very same religiosity took offence at the subject. Contemporary sensibilities even frowned on paintings of men and women talking together freely in railway carriages. The circumstances in which Hunt’s young lady finds herself may not now be immediately obvious, yet this is still a powerful portrayal of spiritual emotion. (Serena Cant)

The Doctor (c. 1891)

Sir Luke Fildes was a painter and illustrator who made his name with a series of works dealing with contemporary social issues. The Doctor was probably the most famous of these. It became a star attraction at London’s Tate Gallery when it opened in 1897. In the latter part of the 19th century, the growth of literacy brought an increasing range of illustrated magazines onto the market, which in turn offered greater opportunities for artists. One of the most significant new arrivals was The Graphic, which first appeared in 1869 and made a splash with its full-page engravings of everyday working life. Fildes was a regular contributor and often turned his popular illustrations into full-size paintings. The somber realism of his work impressed the tycoon Sir Henry Tate, who commissioned him to paint a subject of his own choosing. Fildes opted for The Doctor, a theme that was inspired by the death of his first child in 1877. He translated this memory into a working-class setting, creating an elaborate mock-up of a fisherman’s cottage in his studio. In artistic terms, Fildes’s main concern was with the dual light source, showing the contrast between the warm glow of the oil lamp and the bleak, first glimmerings of daylight. For the public, however, the picture’s lasting achievement lay in its moving depiction of the doctor’s devotion. The medical profession was well aware of this and instructed its students to “remember always to hold before you the ideal figure of Luke Fildes’s picture, and be at once gentle men and gentle doctors.” (Iain Zaczek)