National Portrait Gallery (London)
History, Galleries, Permanent Collection.
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National Portrait Gallery (London) |
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National Portrait Gallery (London)Contents • Summary |
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APPRECIATING PAINTING National Portrait Gallery, London is one of the best art museums in the world. |
The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in St Martin's Place, London, is one of the top art museums in Europe devoted exclusively to portrait art, and contains works in a variety of different media. Opened to the public in 1856, it moved to its current site next to the National Gallery around the corner from Trafalgar Square, in 1896. The enormous collection of the National Portrait Gallery contains more than 200,000 portraits of historically important and famous British people, together with more than 250,000 original photographic images. There are typically about 1,400 portraits on display at any one time. Although portraiture is selected on the basis of the importance of the sitter, not that of the artist or the materials used, the collection contains works by many of the world's best portrait artists and the the best English painters. Portraitists include the greatest Old Masters and the top modern artists, as well as the most avant-garde postmodernist artists, of all nationalities. In addition to its headquarters at St Martin's Place, the National Portrait Gallery also has three regional centres at Beningbrough Hall (York), Bodelwyddan Castle (Denbighshire, North Wales) and Montacute House (Yeovil, Somerset). Note that the NPG (London) has no connection with the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. The NPG receives just over 2 million visitors per year and is sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Other important art centres in the UK include the British Museum, the Tate Gallery (London, Liverpool, St Ives), the Courtauld Gallery (London), the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), and the British Royal Art Collection (various locations). Among the best galleries of contemporary art is the Saatchi Gallery (London). |
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The NPG commemorates its three principal founders with three portrait busts over the main entrance. They include Philip Henry Stanhope, 5th Earl Stanhope, together with his two supporters, Thomas Macaulay, and Thomas Carlyle. Following three parliamentary attempts by Stanhope (1846-56) proposing the idea of a National Portrait Gallery, it was finally accepted and duly approved by Queen Victoria in 1856. A sum of £2000 was set aside by parliament to set up the gallery, whose establishment was also overseen by Benjamin Disraeli and by Lord Ellesmere, who donated the first work to the NPG - the Chandos portrait of William Shakespeare (1600-1610). For the first 40 years of its life, the gallery occupied a series of locations in London, including 29 Great George Street, Westminster; Exhibition Road; Bethnal Green Museum; before finally taking up residence in a new building in St Martin's Place, designed by Ewan Christian. Since then the gallery has been extended twice. A new wing, financed by Lord Duveen, was added in 1933, and a second wing financed by Sir Christopher Ondaatje and the Heritage Lottery Fund was opening in 2000. The National Portrait Gallery is divided into the following displays: Tudor and Elizabethan Galleries
(1485-1603) Stuart and Civil War Galleries (1603-1714) Georgian Galleries (1714-1800) Weldon Galleries (1795-1837) Victorian and Edwardian Galleries
(1837-1910) 20th Century Galleries (1914-90) Lerner Galleries The National Portrait Gallery was established on the basis that its collection was to be about "history", rather than the "art", and about the identity and status of the sitter, not the quality or type of image produced. This criterion is still used when deciding which works should or should not be included in the National Portrait Gallery's collection. In addition, at the beginning, it was agreed by the gallery's Trustees that "No portrait of any person still living, or deceased less that 10 years" should be acquired, except in the case of the reigning Sovereign. This rule was relaxed in 1969 in order to permit the admission of living sitters. In addition to its collections of historical portraits, the NPG showcases a rapidly changing selection of contemporary art, organizes exhibitions of portraiture by individual artists and hosts the annual BP Portrait Prize competition. Although as you might expect, painting and drawing are the two main types of art in the NPG, the primary collection also includes a host of works in different media. They include portraits in acrylics, gouache, grisaille, and watercolour, along with works drawn in biro, chalk, charcoal, Conté crayon, ink, pastels, pen and ink, pencil and silverpoint. It includes portrait prints like etchings, aquatints, engravings, lithographs, silk-screen prints and woodcuts, as well as portraits made with contemporary media including assemblage, papier-mâché, cardboard and stencils. Its sculpture portraits include works in bronze, clay, enamel, terracotta, plaster, marble, wax and wood. There are also numerous examples of miniature painting, cartoons, and caricature art, as well as mosaics. The oldest work is an oil painting of King Henry VII, dated 1505, by an unknown Netherlandish artist. The smallest is a miniature portrait (the size of a thumbnail) of Henrietta Anne, Duchess of Orleans, thought to be by Jean Petitot, possibly after Pierre Mignard, which dates to the 17th century. The largest work is a portrait by John Singer Sargent, entitled General Officers of World War I (1922), which measures some 5.3 metres in width. In addition, there is a significant collection of portrait photography, including some 130,000 original negatives. The NPG's primary collection contains portrait paintings by many of greatest visual artists, both from Britain and around the world. Here is a very short selection of the portraits on display. PRIMARY COLLECTION King Henry VIII; King Henry VII
(1537) Queen Elizabeth I (1573) Anthony van Dyck - Self Portrait
(1640) Samuel Johnson (1757) Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of
Chesterfield (1765) John Henderson (1775) John Home (1818) John Philip Kemble (1820) Charles Dickens (1839) Alfred Tennyson (1840) Sir Richard Burton (1872-85) Gladstone (1879) Cardinal Manning (1881) Augustus John (c.1900) Winston Churchill (1927) Ramsay MacDonald (1931) George Bernard Shaw (1934) Laurence Stephen Lowry - Self Portrait
(1938) T.S. Eliot (1949) Barbara Hepworth - Self Portrait
(1950) Kenneth Clark (1964) Don Bachardy; Christopher Isherwood
(1976) Arnold Goodman (1985) Death Mask (2002) A Self-Portrait In addition, there are portraits by the pioneer figurative painter William Hogarth (1697-1764), the horse painter George Stubbs (1724-1806), the visual chronicler Johann Zoffany (1733-1810), chiaroscuro expert Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97), British-American artist John Singleton Copley (1737-1815), and the President of the Royal Academy Martin Archer Shee (1769-1850), to name but a few. PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION The collection of camera art contains photo-portraits by many of the world's greatest photographers, of which the following is a tiny sample. Portrait Photograph of Anthony Trollope
(1864) Portrait Photograph of W.H. Auden
(1930) Portrait Photograph of Virginia Woolf
(1934) Portrait Photograph of Princess Elizabeth
II (1943) Portrait Photograph of Vivien Leigh;
Laurence Olivier (1949) Portrait Photograph of Duchess of Windsor;
Duke of Windsor (1957) Portrait Photograph of Michael Caine
(1965) Portrait Photograph of Queen Elizabeth
II; Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother; Princess Margaret (1980) "The
Blue Portrait" Portrait Photograph of John Cleese
(1990) |
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• For more details about painting and sculpture in the UK, see: Homepage.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ART |
