National treasures: Prince Charles, Mary McCartney and more on their favourite National Gallery artwork

HRH The Prince of Wales

The Burlington House Cartoon (c 1499-1500)

by Leonardo da Vinci

I am delighted that the National Gallery has opened its doors again. How we all missed being able to visit the nation’s museums and galleries that hold so many of our cultural treasures. To choose a “favourite” picture from such an array is virtually impossible, but I must say that Leonardo da Vinci’s Burlington House Cartoon holds a particularly special place in my heart.

It may seem strange to choose what is essentially a drawing, from a collection of remarkable paintings, but I suspect it goes back to my childhood when I used to marvel at the Leonardo drawings in the Royal Library at Windsor. They have always been part of my life and I love his obvious fascination with nature, science and the human condition.

The Cartoon is a mysterious and wonderful thing, linking Leonardo’s interest in his native Italian landscape and the monumental figures, both grand and fragile, united in their love of the Christ Child and shrouded in the charcoal dust from which they are made. There is also something wonderful about working on wood. It has always seemed to me beautifully simple that you could make an image using such natural materials that will hopefully last in perpetuity.

As Patron, I look forward to the opportunity of visiting the National Gallery again soon and to it being enjoyed once more by everybody, including, in the not-too-distant future, all our visitors from abroad whom we miss so much.

Michael Morpurgo

A Wheatfield, with Cypresses (1889)

by Vincent van Gogh

We’re standing on the edge of a wheat field, in a wild place. There’s not an abundance of poppies and wild flowers, but there are some. The wheat has grown to ripeness, to goldenness, and it is leaning in the wind. You can imagine the farmer, I think, hoping that the wind is not going to become any stronger, because if the wheat breaks he’s in trouble. Your eye is drawn to the cypress trees: mama cypress and baby cypress standing side by side. I wonder if anyone ever noticed cypress trees before Van Gogh painted them.

Everything in the painting is leaning the way the wind is blowing. You can see wind in the clouds coming up from behind the mountains. You feel the wind coming out of the painting, blowing at you. You can see rain in the clouds too, but it’s not quite raining yet. And a rather lovely light blue Provencal sky. The colours glow – the whole thing glows at you. I can just see Van Gogh painting, feel him standing there, the speed at which it was done.

It’s something to do with his own immersion in the landscape, and his connection with everything in it. You feel that he is part of it, he is the witness. I love the honesty of it, the integrity of it. You get the feeling that no one has taught him perspective, or whatever it is you study for years and years in college. It’s wonderful to come across a painter who seems to be completely instinctive.

My son is a painter, and I go to galleries a lot with my wife, Clare. I often revisit particular paintings. I like to target things. I stand – or sit if I can, there are never enough seats – and watch and watch and drown myself in the painting and its story. A story and a picture are not that far apart, it’s just the manner of telling that differs.

Flamingo Boy by Michael Morpurgo (Harper Collins Children’s Books)

Gugu Mbatha-Raw

The Umbrellas (c 1881-86)

by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

I grew up making art, and even considered becoming an artist instead of an actor. When I was starting out, in between jobs or auditions I would often go to the National Gallery. Having a place to experience images and stories from other generations was important to me. I found it calming and inspiring.

Renoir’s painting, of a woman walking through a sea of people with umbrellas, has a cinematic energy to it; all around her there’s this bustling sense of movement. I love the mood it evokes, all that light and colour – it doesn’t even feel like it’s raining. It feels quite emotional. The woman’s expression is mysterious, slightly sad. With her head on one side she looks thoughtful. And because she’s looking out at us, there’s this wonderful moment of connection in an otherwise very frantic scene.

It’s not often that you have a female figure in a painting staring out at you like that. There’s an arresting power in that gaze. I thought about that a lot when I was preparing for the film Belle, because my character, the mixed-race heiress Dido Elizabeth Belle, was specifically inspired by a painting in which Dido connects directly with the viewer; so rare for a woman of colour in art of the time.

I recently started painting again, which I hadn’t done since I was 18 years old. It’s like acting, in that it’s a method of expression, and when you focus on it, when you get into the flow, it’s joyous.

Jessie Burton

Combing the Hair (c 1896)

by Edgar Degas

This is a composition of two women, and a moment of peace.

One of the women is combing the hair of the other. I think the older-looking woman is the seated woman’s maid, but I didn’t think of it in those terms when I first saw it; rather, as one woman administering a service to another. It looks like the maid is really concentrating, and that she is very deft.

Some people hate having their hair brushed but, for most, it’s a lovely thing to have someone do that for you. It’s tactile, a fine balance between pleasure and pain, and quite sensuous. The seated girl seems so lost in the experience, in her own world. The standing woman is, too, so what you have is an intimate moment into which we’ve been invited.

Degas has used very warm, alluring shades: russet, peach, yellow. And there’s something, especially after the year we’ve endured, in the women’s physical closeness. The craving for that.

Because I can’t paint, I find paintings so enticing. The Miniaturist was inspired by 17th-century Dutch interiors, and in The Muse I write about the life of a painter. With reading, and writing, the story comes to you over time. But with a painting, it comes all at once. Nothing compares to the effect of that.

Mary McCartney

The Ambassadors (1533)

by Hans Holbein

I was lucky that when we were growing up, my mum and dad would often take us to art museums. My mum was a New Yorker, and we particularly loved going to MoMA. When I’m looking for creative inspiration for my photographs now, I often go to a museum. Roaming around, you can learn so much. I’m somebody who likes to wander about and just happen on something that arrests my attention.

The Ambassadors is a painting that did just that. The large scale of it is initially striking but it also has so many layers to it. It is quite a formal double portrait of two ambassadors standing side by side. They make eye contact with the viewer in a way that is very engaging.

The painting is full of questions and symbols – a globe, musical instruments, mathematical instruments, star-gazing apparatus – the most recent discoveries of that time. These are Renaissance men in an image that captures the English Renaissance, the age of humanism and Shakespeare.

Holbein was the English court painter at that time and there is a great weightiness to his work, those opulent textiles and rich colours. The green curtain intrigues me – what’s behind it?

I saw this picture several times before I noticed the strange splodge in the middle, between the men. If you look at it from the right angle, it looks like a skull. It’s like an angel hovering in the painting, designed to remind us of our own mortality. Uncanny, unsettling and just out of reach, it reveals itself almost at the last furtive glance over the shoulder as you leave the room.

Mary McCartney is collaborating with Henzel Studio on a limited edition collection of art rugs and pillows available this autumn at marymccartney.com

Fiona Shaw

The Execution of Maximilian (c 1867-8)

by Edouard Manet

In 1864, Napoleon III sent an Austrian archduke, Maximilian of Habsburg, to Mexico, to run the Second Mexican Empire. Of course, he shouldn’t have been there; and once Napoleon withdrew his troops, leaving this poor man behind, Maximilian was executed by a firing squad. It had nothing to do with his virtue. He was the victim of imperial politics.

You don’t actually need to know the story for this painting to be riveting. Partly that’s because it’s a mystery. Because you’re standing behind these men as a witness to the execution, but at first you don’t know why.

The man on the right, wielding a gun, has a casual carelessness; he’s very used to the violence that is happening next to him. We don’t actually see Maximilian, except for his hand, holding the hand of his second in command, General Miramón. The dark sky behind makes it feel a bit like a dream you might have.

Manet was captivated by this story and he worked terribly hard to get the painting to the place he wanted it to be. This is only one of several versions he made. It’s a patchwork of four panels because after he died it was cut up and sold in bits. Manet never saw it in its cut-up form – he’d probably ban it – but actually, it’s brilliant, like a strange collage, or the way some modern TV series are cut: you don’t need a whole narrative laid out in front of you. You just need the pieces and you fill in the gaps yourself.

Antony Gormley

The Baptism of Christ (1446)

by Piero della Francesca

Everything in the painting seems to be holding its breath. We, the angel, and the rest of the world are waiting for the drop of water, balancing on the point of the cockle shell held in John the Baptist’s hand, to fall. So much is at stake here. The world is about to change.

The clouds in this pale blue sky and the dove above Christ’s head hover like spaceships in the sky. The river Jordan is a puddle in which the hill, the sky and the distant town of Borgo Santo Sepolcro are all perfectly mirrored. There are three men in large, coloured hats on the right-hand side of the painting. They are talking together. They seem to be deciding something. Between them and us is a man who leans forward, taking off his shirt. He’s naked except for a pair of white underpants that look curiously like Calvin Kleins. He, like the angels, Christ, and St John the Baptist, is almost translucent, a kind of spectre of light.

Looking at the painting, we are held in its stillness. While being of this world, and in this world, it suggests the possibility of another: a world outside pain, struggle and confusion. For me, this painting is a touchstone. It evokes the possibility that art is beyond time and the contingencies of daily life.

The National Gallery, London WC2 is open daily. Book your free visit at nationalgallery.org.uk