This handbook is both a practical companion and a serious art-historical guide to the National Gallery, giving visitors opening hours, admission details, and a carefully organized path through its collection. Compiled by E. T. Cook with a preface by John Ruskin, it treats the gallery as a living library of great paintings, to be studied closely like rare books and compared across the major European schools from early Italian art to Dutch, Spanish, and French traditions. Ruskin praises the volume as an unusually rich guide for earnest students, reflecting on the Gallery's role in shaping public understanding of art and on the uncertain fortunes by which great collections are formed. The catalogue then moves through revised attributions, showing how expert judgment can reassign familiar works and reveal the instability of connoisseurship. Alongside these scholarly debates, it offers vivid appreciations of individual paintings: Jan van Huysum's exquisite flower piece, Aelbert Cuyp's luminous portraiture, Philippe de Champaigne's noble Richelieu, Marco Marziale's ornamentally rich Circumcision, Crivelli's symbolic Madonna, Michelangelo's monumental Holy Family, and Bellini's serene Death of St. Peter Martyr. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.