Guildhall Art Gallery
Guildhall Yard London EC2V 5AE
Right next to the medieval Guildhall in the City of London, the Guildhall Art Gallery houses the City of London Corporation’s art collection, which includes many well-known paintings and sculptures from the last 400 years, with a particular focus on London – London artists, London people in portraits, London landscapes, etc. The largest painting on permanent display, The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar (also known as The Siege of Gibraltar), by John Singleton Copley, spans two floors of the gallery, but there are lots of other works worth coming to see, including La Ghirlandata by Rossetti and The Music Lesson by Leighton. What’s less well-known is that the Guildhall was built on the site of a Roman amphitheatre; you can see the curved line of the original structure in the courtyard, while in the basement you can view the 2000-year-old remains.