National Trust

The National Trust is a conservation charity rather than a single museum you can visit. It was founded in 1895 by three Victorians who feared the countryside and its old buildings were being lost: the social reformer Octavia Hill, the solicitor Robert Hunter, and a Lake District clergyman, Hardwicke Rawnsley. Their idea was to buy threatened places and hold them, in trust, for everyone.

Today it looks after more than 500 historic houses, castles and gardens across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and with them close to a million works of art. That makes its holdings one of the largest art collections in Britain, though they are scattered room by room through the houses where the pictures have always hung, rather than gathered under one roof.

For an art visitor the reward is seeing paintings in the settings they were bought for. At Petworth House in Sussex, the painter Turner was a regular guest of the Earl of Egremont in the 1830s, and the house still holds a room of his landscapes. Elsewhere you meet portraits by Gainsborough and Reynolds, Dutch cabinet pictures, and family collections built up over centuries. What the Trust preserves is the whole house around the art, down to the furniture and the view from the window.