National Portrait Gallery
The Real Tudors, National Portrait GalleryFriday, 19 September 2014
For all the political hurly burly, social change and religious upheaval of the Tudor period and the intriguing personal histories of its monarchs, it is surely the portraits of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I that have done most to secure the Tudors in... Read more... |
What Lies Beneath: The Secret Life of PaintingsWednesday, 30 July 2014
The doctoring of political images became something of a tradition in the last century, with Stalin, Hitler and Mao all airbrushing their enemies from photographs. The latest infrared technology has revealed that something similar may have happened... Read more... |
Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision, National Portrait GalleryTuesday, 15 July 2014
Do we need more? Over the past 60 years thousands of books and bibliographies about Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and the group of friends, lovers, spouses, partners, children, and houses with which she is associated, have been published, not to... Read more... |
The Great War in Portraits, National Portrait GallerySunday, 02 March 2014
Telling a story through an exhibition can be a bad idea, partly because it seems a little pedestrian but mainly because it runs the risk of using art as illustration, glibly treating paintings as if they were objective visual records. In its title,... Read more... |
Bailey's Stardust, National Portrait GallerySaturday, 08 February 2014
Several hundred photographs, of varying scales and most of them newly printed gelatin silver prints in superb tones of greys blacks and whites, take us into a world that has been subliminally familiar to us for nearly 50 years.Stardust is the title... Read more... |
Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2013, National Portrait GalleryWednesday, 20 November 2013
The precise nature of the photographic portrait has always been contested, and this year’s Taylor Wessing Prize only fuels the debate. While historically photographers have questioned the portrait’s ability to go beyond physical fact to reveal a... Read more... |
Elizabeth I and Her People, National Portrait GallerySaturday, 19 October 2013
At the beginning of the 17th century an anonymous Anglo-Netherlandish artist produced an elaborate procession portrait of the septuagenarian Virgin Queen, tactfully portrayed as though several decades younger, when she had succeeded to the throne in... Read more... |
Jonathan Yeo Portraits, National Portrait GalleryWednesday, 11 September 2013
Grayson Perry is sitting pretty amid a swathe of soft-focus pink. Dressed as his alter ego Claire he sits on a pink bed with pink pillows, his pink ruched dress spread about him with its frilly underskirt on view. Placed on his lap are his... Read more... |
Laura Knight: Portraits, National Portrait GalleryMonday, 15 July 2013
Laura Knight’s wartime masterpiece Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-Ring (1943) is a subtly glamorous picture, strikingly composed. A frieze of blue-clad women at an armament factory workbench are in the background, highlighting the profiled figure of... Read more... |
BP Portrait Award 2013, National Portrait GalleryThursday, 20 June 2013
One is increasingly struck by the oddity of an annual portrait prize, or at least I am. Imagine an annual still life award or an open competition for a major prize for abstract art. And imagine how formulaic and stale that would soon become. How... Read more... |
Jacob Epstein: Portraits, National Portrait GalleryMonday, 08 April 2013
“I don’t like the family Stein; There is Gert, there is Ep and there’s Ein; Gert’s Poems are bunk, Ep’s statues are punk, And nobody understands Ein” (Anon).Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) did indeed sculpt Albert Einstein when the physicist was briefly... Read more... |
George Catlin: American Indian Portraits, National Portrait GalleryThursday, 07 March 2013
Scores of reddish-bronze skinned men, and a few women and children, in full regalia, festooned in face paint, feathers, jewellery and decorations of all kind. They stare out at us, impassive and imperturbable, immortalised by George Catlin (1796-... Read more... |
