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Poison pen

Michael Desmond examines the career of the eighteenth-century suspected poisoner and portrait artist Thomas Griffiths Wainewright.

Wunderkind lost

Inga Walton on the brief but brilliant life of Hugh Ramsay.

Natural, artistic and unselfconscious

Angus Trumble gazes at the once bright star of photographer Ruth Hollick.

Queen Victoria, 1901

Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 2018

Time and light

This sample of 56 photographs takes in some of the smallest photographs we own and some of the largest, some of the earliest and some of the most recent, as well as multiple photographic processes from daguerreotypes to digital media.

Empire records

Celebrates the centenary of the first national art collection, the Historic Memorials Collection, housed at Australia's Parliament House.

Canadian identities

An exploration of national identity in the Canadian context drawn from the symposium Face to Face at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2004.

Annual Appeal

Small worlds

Bess Norriss Tait created miniature watercolour portraits full of character and life.

An actress and her fans

Dr. Sarah Engledow discovers the amazing life of Ms. Hilda Spong, little remembered star of the stage, who was captured in a portrait by Tom Roberts.

Vanity fair

Ashleigh Wadman rediscovers the Australian characters represented with a kindly touch by the British portrait artist Leslie Ward for the society magazine Vanity Fair.

Getting a head

Alexandra Roginski gets a feel for phrenology’s fundamentals.

All dressed up

Jane Raffan asks do clothes make the portrait, and can the same work with a new title fetch a better price?

The importance of being bearded

Joanna Gilmour discovers that the beards of the ill-fated explorers Burke and Wills were as epic as their expedition to traverse Australia from south to north.

In good company

Jean Appleton’s 1965 self portrait makes a fine addition to the National Portrait Gallery’s collection writes Joanna Gilmour.