Famous Art Pieces from the United Kingdom

By: Naajia Thomas

John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott, 1888This famous painting is on display at Tate Britain, London.It is inspired by Alfred Lord Tennyson's lyrical ballad of the same name, Waterhouse's painting portrays the hurting woman whose undeniable love for Sir Lancelot brought on a curse which led to her death. The moment painted here occurs in the fourth part of Tennyson's poem, when “at the closing of the day… She loosed the chain, and down she lay; The broad stream bore her far away.”

John Everett Millais painted “Ophelia”. This painting is on display at Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow This iconic painting shows the scene in which Ophelia, driven mad by Hamlet's taunts, falls into a river or little stream and drowns. Millais's treatment of the model for the painting has become infamous, as he forced the young Elizabeth Siddal to lie fully clothed in a tub of cold water while he completed his work. The painting is normally on display at Tate Britain, but keen Millais fans can currently see it at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

Francis Bacon’s “Head VI” is on display at Manchester Art Gallery. Bacon would dismiss his head series as 'silly', his nightmarish paintings inspired by Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent IX are “powerfully unsettling” to most people who views them. The head of the figure is almost entirely taken up by the screaming mouth, for which Bacon found inspiration in hand-colored illustrations of medical books on mouth disease.

JMW Turner’s “The Fighting Temeraire” is on display at the National Gallery in London. This scene captures the moment of transition from a romantic past into an industrial future. The Temeraire, a warship which served at the Battle of Trafalgar, is painted as a spectral form on the horizon, towed to its final dockyard by a smoke-belching tug. The painting featured in the most recent James Bond movie, Skyfall, as the ageing agent thinks about his own retirement.