Three anniversaries, three portrait exhibitions

Anniversaries at the National Portrait Gallery are handy hooks for small specialist displays, and a trio has just opened.

Herbert Morrison (1888-1965) is billed as the Cockney Socialist, and shown in scores of photographs, caricatures and cartoons to mark the 50th anniversary of his brainchild, the Festival of Britain. (What would he have thought of his grandson Peter Mandelson's equivalent brainchild, the Millenium Dome?) The influential working-class Londoner rose from politicking at the London County Council in his thirties to become Home Secretary during the Blitz. The triumph of the Festival of Britain seemed to epitomise a brave new postwar world. It is something, though, when the desk furniture – statuesque telephones and piles of paper – upstages the politician, in a 1930 Bassano photograph of Morrison at the London County Council. Bernard Partridge does enliven things when he dresses Morrison up as Oberon the King of the Fairies chatting to Puck, in his 1935 cartoon The Fairy Ring: Oberon (Morrison) to Puck: "You can't put a girdle round the Earth in forty minutes? Why not help me put a green belt round London in 40 months?"

A few steps away there is a swooning love-in for images both bohemian and domestic, by and of Augustus John, who died 50 years ago. John was really the domesticated Lucian Freud of his day, nine children from his lifelong ménage a trois with wife Ida Nettleship and muse Dorelia. A Life in Portraits shows us the artist looking gorgeously romantic in his twenties, and the demented-looking bearded old man staring heavily on the cover of Life magazine in 1952 (photographed by Alfred Eisenstadt). Along the way we see photographs of the Slade School picnic (1899), John at the train station bidding a fond farewell to the model and actress Iris Tree (pictured above), John with Brancusi and Frank Dobson, probably attending the opening of The Tri National Art Exhibition in Chelsea, and a domestic but melancholy portrait by Cecil Beaton of Dorelia and the shaky old Augustus in their kitchen (1960).

On the lower level there is a series of specially commissioned photographs to mark a year to go to the Olympics. They thoughtfully portray the hard work of those behind the scenes – ecologists, administrators, policemen etc – as well as those upfront, the athletes. The portraits by Emma Hardy and Finlay Mackay remind us of such preparations as commissioning Michael Morpurgo to write the official story, and Danny Boyle to orchestrate the spectacle.

• Exhibitions featuring Herbert Morrison and Augustus John at the National Portrait Gallery until 18 March