Sully · stories told through gestures

Choose a face, then follow its gaze. That is a useful way into the French paintings on this floor, which span the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. A hand, a sideways glance or a patch of light can tell you where the story is happening. In The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds, Georges de La Tour, a seventeenth-century French painter, lets you notice what a richly dressed young card player has missed. Watch the looks exchanged around him. The other figures seem to know something he does not. You become part of that small circle of knowledge simply by paying attention. Another painting in this collection, Pilgrimage to Cythera, helped Antoine Watteau, an eighteenth-century French painter, enter the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1717. It offers a different encounter, and a good reason to keep looking beyond the first famous name you recognise. Give each picture a moment before its title explains it: who attracts your attention, who looks away, and what do their hands add to the conversation?