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The scene depicted is from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act IV, Scene vii, in which Ophelia, driven out of her mind when her father is murdered by her lover Hamlet, falls into a stream and drowns. The model for the painting, Elizabeth Siddal, was required to pose over a four-month period in a bath full of water kept warm by lamps underneath.

• On display in Beauty as Protest: 1845–1905, Historic and Modern British Art, Room 10

This installation is made from an immense grid of over 200 cages, light bulbs and the amplified sound of electric currents. As the bulbs light up and fade out at irregular intervals, they sporadically illuminate the surrounding gallery. Hatoum is known for her large-scale installations and sculptures that challenge the visual language of minimalism and surrealism to expose a world characterised by conflicts and contradictions.

• On display in Mona Hatoum: Current Disturbance, Modern and Contemporary British Art, Room 27

The children lighting lanterns are Dolly and Polly Barnard. John Singer Sargent was friends with their father, illustrator Frederick Barnard. Sargent painted it in a garden in Broadway, a village in south-west England where Sargent stayed in the summer of 1885. Sargent wanted to paint from real life. There were only a few minutes each evening where the light was right. He would place his easel and paints, pose the models beforehand, and wait for the right moment to start.

• On display in Art for the Crowd: 1815–1905, Historic and Modern British Art, Room 8

Alfred Tennyson’s poem ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (1833) describes a heroine confined to a tower and cursed to die if she looks directly upon the outside world. By using a mirror, she embroiders scenes of passers-by. When the Lady glimpses the Arthurian knight Sir Lancelot she falls in love and defies the curse. Out in the cold world, on the point of death, she frees a boat to seek him. Pre-Raphaelite clues foretell her fate: swallows fly low as the wind blows her hair and extinguishes the candles.

• On display in Art for the Crowd: 1815–1905, Historic and Modern British Art, Room 8

In December 1840 a grand state funeral was held for French military commander and political leader Napoleon I. Turner, however, imagines him alone and powerless in exile on the island of St. Helena. He is guarded by a British soldier. Despite its patriotic theme, the critics attacked this painting. ‘Truly ludicrous’, wrote one, complaining that the reflection of Napoleon’s boots in the water suggested he was standing on ‘two long black stilts’.

• On display in Turner and His Critics, JMW Turner, Room 32

This work is generally considered one in a series of Black Triptychs which followed the suicide of Bacon’s lover, George Dyer. Dyer appears on the left and Bacon is on the right. The artist’s biographer wrote: ‘What death has not already consumed seeps incontinently out of the figures as their shadows.’

• On display in Francis Bacon and Henry Moore, Modern and Contemporary British Art, Room 23

This is one of the largest of Moore's sculptures of a seated female nude, and it was cast in an edition of nine. The original plaster is in the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and the curator there, Alan Wilkinson, has described this sculpture as 'one of the most potent images of fertility produced in the 20th century'. He also related it to Moore's early interest in Palaeolithic sculpture, an influence the artist readily acknowledged.

• On display in Francis Bacon and Henry Moore, Modern and Contemporary British Art, Room 23

This artwork is a tribute to the London teenager Stephen Lawrence who was murdered in a racially motivated attack in 1993. A public inquiry into the murder investigation concluded that the Metropolitan police force was institutionally racist. In each of the tears shed by the woman in the painting is a collaged image of Stephen Lawrence’s face, while the words ‘R.I.P. Stephen Lawrence’ are just discernible beneath the layers of paint. As well as this specific reference, the artist intended the painting to be read as a universal portrayal of melancholy and grief.

• On display in End of a Century: 1990–2000, Modern and Contemporary British Art, Room 26

This artwork references The Gallery of HMS Calcutta (Portsmouth) c.1876 by the nineteenth-century French painter James Tissot (1836–1902), a work that is also in Tate’s collection (Tate N04847). Tissot’s painting depicts the flirtation between a naval officer and a young woman. Himid has reworked the composition to focus on two women, who appear consumed by their own thoughts and by feelings of longing as they stand before the grey expanse of the sea.

• On display in The State We’re In: 2000–now, Modern and Contemporary British Art, Room 20

This artwork is a small-scale oil painting of a female figure with closely cropped hair. Her mouth is open as though caught mid-speech or song. The motif of the carnivalesque ruff is one that reappears in Yiadom-Boakye’s work from 2009 onwards. The fictitious figure is situated in an undefined abstract space devoid of reference to a particular place or time, leaving the historicity deliberately ambiguous.

• On display in The State We’re In: 2000–now, Modern and Contemporary British Art, Room 20