The National Portrait Gallery: An Introduction to its Highlights

The National Portrait Gallery holds one of the world's great collections of human faces. On this self-guided tour, you'll trace how portrait painting evolved from Tudor propaganda to contemporary conceptual art, discovering how each era used likeness to project power, identity, and meaning.

The tour starts at the Gallery's main entrance on St Martin's Place, where the new bronze doors by Tracey Emin set the tone for what's inside. You'll ride the escalator up to the third floor, where the Tudor Rooms house some of the collection's most celebrated works, before moving through the Stuart and Georgian galleries and descending through Victorian and modern collections. Along the way, you'll encounter royalty, explorers, nurses, fascists, and fashion icons – all rendered in paint, glass, and frozen blood.

The tour ends in Room 32 on the ground floor, a space lined with death masks from the past and dominated by Marc Quinn's extraordinary sculpture Self – a life mask made from ten pints of the artist's own blood, kept frozen in a refrigerated steel cabinet as a meditation on mortality and the fragility of existence.

On this 120-minute tour, you'll have a chance to:

• Examine Hans Holbein the Younger's Henry VIII cartoon, the only work by Holbein in the collection and a rare survival of the Tudor painting process
• Stand before the Ditchley Portrait of Elizabeth I, painted by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, showing the Queen standing on a map of England
• Learn how Sir Francis Drake's coat of arms encodes his circumnavigation of the globe – and his role in launching England's slave trade
• Discover the only known painted portrait of Mary Seacole, the Jamaican-born nurse refused by Florence Nightingale and forgotten for over a century after her death
• Consider what Oswald Mosley's quietly dignified 1925 portrait reveals about how fascism presents itself
• Unpack how Jason Brooks' hyperrealistic portrait of geneticist Paul Nurse uses photographic techniques – depth of field, cropping, grisaille – that are actually centuries old
• See Alex Katz's portrait of Anna Wintour, which deliberately uses the visual language of Byzantine icons to turn a fashion editor into a timeless, gold-background saint

The National Portrait Gallery's permanent collection is free, making this tour exceptional value for two hours of art, history, and ideas.