Description
The National Portrait Gallery in London is a museum of faces: portraits of the people who made British history and culture, from monarchs and poets to the faces of today. It stands just off Trafalgar Square, beside the National Gallery, and it opened in 1856.
The rule here is unusual: portraits are chosen for who is in them, not for who painted them. So a Reynolds self-portrait shares the walls with curiosities. The collection includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, photographs and caricatures.
The first portrait to enter the gallery, in 1856, is still its most famous: the Chandos portrait, the best-known likeness of William Shakespeare. Is it really him? Nobody can be quite sure.
Don't miss Edward VI's anamorphic portrait by William Scrots, stretched so that it looks right only from one angle, and Branwell Brontë's painting of his sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne.
The group portrait of the 1604 Somerset House Conference is a document in itself. A sculpture of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in medieval costume is a curiosity of its own. Living people were allowed in only from 1969.
The visit starts with the escalator of the Ondaatje Wing, a long two-storey climb that carries visitors straight up to the Tudors. A major renovation, finished in 2023, also gave the gallery a new entrance with bronze doors by Tracey Emin.
The doors carry 45 portraits of unnamed women. Inside, new galleries tell the story from the Tudors to now, and the contemporary portraits change often, as does the annual BP Portrait Prize show.
The idea came from Earl Stanhope, who had to propose it three times before Parliament agreed. His bust watches over the old entrance, between Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle. The Chandos portrait was the gift of Lord Ellesmere, one of the first trustees.
For its first forty years the gallery moved around London: Westminster, Exhibition Road, then Bethnal Green. In 1896 it settled in its present building, paid for by the philanthropist William Henry Alexander, beside the National Gallery.
The rule here is unusual: portraits are chosen for who is in them, not for who painted them. So a Reynolds self-portrait shares the walls with curiosities. The collection includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, photographs and caricatures.
The first portrait to enter the gallery, in 1856, is still its most famous: the Chandos portrait, the best-known likeness of William Shakespeare. Is it really him? Nobody can be quite sure.
Don't miss Edward VI's anamorphic portrait by William Scrots, stretched so that it looks right only from one angle, and Branwell Brontë's painting of his sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne.
The group portrait of the 1604 Somerset House Conference is a document in itself. A sculpture of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in medieval costume is a curiosity of its own. Living people were allowed in only from 1969.
The visit starts with the escalator of the Ondaatje Wing, a long two-storey climb that carries visitors straight up to the Tudors. A major renovation, finished in 2023, also gave the gallery a new entrance with bronze doors by Tracey Emin.
The doors carry 45 portraits of unnamed women. Inside, new galleries tell the story from the Tudors to now, and the contemporary portraits change often, as does the annual BP Portrait Prize show.
The idea came from Earl Stanhope, who had to propose it three times before Parliament agreed. His bust watches over the old entrance, between Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle. The Chandos portrait was the gift of Lord Ellesmere, one of the first trustees.
For its first forty years the gallery moved around London: Westminster, Exhibition Road, then Bethnal Green. In 1896 it settled in its present building, paid for by the philanthropist William Henry Alexander, beside the National Gallery.