British Museum

The British Museum stands in Camden, London, in the United Kingdom, and is one of the most important and most visited museums in the world. Its collections span history, archaeology, ethnography and art, and it holds more than eight million objects. It grew out of the collection of the physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane, which the British state acquired in 1753, and it opened to the public in 1759. Above all it is a museum of antiquities, and its painting holdings are fairly modest. Among the works featured online are William Blake's The Ancient of Days and Jacob's Ladder, Gu Kaizhi's Admonitions of the Instructress, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's None, and Thomas Lawrence's portrait of Sir Joseph Banks.