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Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia
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Home is where the art is
About Face article
Tedi Bills on how social media in the age of COVID-19 has fanned the flames of our portrait fascination.
Indexing, the art of
About Face article
The first index I created was for my first book, and, to my astonishment, that was almost twenty-five years ago.
Dementia and the arts
About Face article
That principle of equity of access has ever since been a noble aspiration for all public art museums, as it is for us here at the National Portrait Gallery.
Seeing stars
Celebrating Science Week
About Face article
It has been suggested that Sir Thomas Brisbane’s interest in the New South Wales governorship was as attributable to his passion for astronomy as to the desirability of the position as a prestigious career move.
The mystery of Enoch Arden
About Face article
Tennyson's Enoch Arden was inspired by a story that Thomas Woolner passed on to him – but whose story and of whom?
The play’s the thing
About Face article
Penelope Grist charts an immersive path through Stuart Spence’s photography.
Portrait dendrochronology
About Face article
Angus's latest Trumbology is accompanied by the following caveat: 'This one is reeeeeeally geeky.'
20/20 launch speech
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Dr Helen Nugent AO, Chairman, National Portrait Gallery at the opening of 20/20: Celebrating twenty years with twenty new portrait commissions.
The eye and the heart
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Nici Cumpston immerses herself in the collective vision of the National Photographic Portrait Prize 2020.
Portraiture in a Bleak House
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It may seem an odd thing to do at one’s leisure on a beautiful tropical island, but I spent much of my midwinter break a few weeks ago re-reading Bleak House.
Giving a dam
True south #1
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Ensconced and meditative in crisp Tasmania, Joanna Gilmour pays tribute to passionate green advocate and photographer Olegas Truchanas.
The Thyssen Art Macabre
About Face article
Books seldom make me angry but this one did. At first, I was powerfully struck by the uncanny parallels that existed between the Mellons of Pittsburgh and the Thyssens of the Ruhr through the same period, essentially the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
The personal and the historical
About Face article
Where do we draw a line between the personal and the historical? Although she died in Melbourne in 1975, when I was not quite eleven years old, I have the vividest memories of my maternal grandmother Helen Borthwick.
Anangu landscape learning
About Face article
Angus' initial perception of Uluru shifts, as he comes to see it as central to the entire order of Anangu life.
The Rothschilds, the Montefiores, and the Victorian Gold Rush
About Face article
Some years ago my colleague Andrea Wolk Rager and I spent several days in the darkened basement of a Rothschild Bank, inspecting every one of the nearly 700 autochromes created immediately before World War I by the youthful Lionel de Rothschild.
Christmas Island
About Face article
This is my last Trumbology before, in a little more than a week from now, I pass to my successor Karen Quinlan the precious baton of the Directorship of the National Portrait Gallery.