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Mrs Woods and ‘Ere, 2013

Purchased 2019

Mrs Woods, 2013

Gift of the artist 2019. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program.

Charles Dickens

Shakespeare to Winehouse

From Shakespeare to Winehouse, Darwin to Dickens, the Beatles, Brontë sisters and Beckham, the National Portrait Gallery London holds the world’s most extensive collection of portraits.

Why portraiture?

Blak Douglas reflects on his experiences, process and motivation for making portraits.

Dempsey's people

Dempsey’s people: a folio of British street portraits 1824–1844 is the first exhibition to showcase the compelling watercolour images of English street people made by the itinerant English painter John Dempsey throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Brougham

A philosopher-style of beard – thick and lengthy; a greyer, hence wiser version of the Burke; and suited to older men who saw themselves as sagacious or statesmanlike.

Beadles, bellmen and bumbles

For Dempsey’s people their occasional encounters with state power would have been largely through the local parish, which administered the ‘Old Poor Law’.

Lord John Russell, 1844

Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 2014

The National Portrait Gallery's 20th Anniversary

Last month we marked the twentieth anniversary of the formal establishment of the National Portrait Gallery, the tenth of the opening of our signature building, and the fifth of our having become a statutory authority under Commonwealth legislation.

Charles Joseph La Trobe, 1853

Purchased 2006

The 1850s to the 1880s

The restrained and cultivated facial hair fashions evident through the first decades of the 1800s were on the wane by the middle of the century, when hirsute faces became mainstream.