The pride and joy of artists Gainsborough, Hogarth, Millais, Whistler, not to mention prominent contemporists such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Damien Hirst are on display in the elegant, cleanly designed galleries of the Tate. A serious draw is the unparalleled collection of works by JMW Turner that dominate the Clore gallery, the largest in the entire world. All the artwork that Turner spent time privately working on in his studio were obtained and put on display, including 300 oil paintings and thousands of sketches and watercolours. His “Self-Portrait”, and larger scale “Rome, from the Vatican”, as well as his unfinished “Norham Castle, Sunrise”, await. At the heart of the Tate is the Archive Gallery that draws on the extensive archive of artworks, sketchbook, letters and photographs documenting the history of the museum, with over a whopping 1 million items tracing the records of artists, world figures, and art organisations since 1900. Francis Bacon, Kenneth Clark, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and Walter Sickert are some familiar names who contributed papers to this exhibit.

Over in the Digital Archive Corridor, you can peruse digitized versions of sketchbooks, scrapbooks, photograph albums and other volumes, flipping virtual pages and using innovative technology to dive into the personal lives of the most important artists in the Tate’s collections. The Duveen Galleries in the centre of the building holds the proud title of being the first public gallery in England created with the sole purpose of showcasing sculptures in mind.