Which London museum displays Leonardo's Burlington House Cartoon?

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The National Gallery displays Leonardo da Vinci’s Burlington House Cartoon in London.

The work is a large-scale drawing formally titled The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist. Leonardo made it around 1506–08 using charcoal and white chalk on paper mounted on canvas. It shows the Virgin Mary, Saint Anne, the Christ Child and the infant John the Baptist in an intertwined composition.

The nickname comes from Burlington House, the Piccadilly building where the drawing was held by the Royal Academy. The National Gallery acquired it in 1962 after a public campaign helped keep the work in Britain. It is now associated with Room 51a in the National Gallery’s collection.

A common mix-up is to confuse the cartoon with Leonardo’s related oil painting, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, which is in the Louvre. “Cartoon” here means a full-size preparatory drawing, not a humorous image; this one was unusually finished and may have been intended as a presentation work.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Sept. 2026

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