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Sideshow Alley

Death masks, post-mortem drawings and other spooky and disquieting portraits... Come and see how portraits of infamous Australians were used in the 19th century.

In the galleries

Christopher Chapman highlights the inaugural hang of the new National Portrait Gallery building which opened in December 2008.

NPPP 2011 exhibition essay

Dr Sarah Engledow, National Photographic Portrait Prize judge and curator, introduces the 2011 Prize.

Dempsey's people

Those of you who are active in social media circles may be aware that through the past week I have unleashed a blitz on Facebook and Instagram in connection with our new winter exhibition Dempsey’s People: A Folio of British Street Portraits, 1824−1844.

The transparent mask

Cate Blanchett and the art of acting in Rosetzky’s digital portrait.

I'm not there

Snap chat

2019 National Photographic Portrait Prize judge Anne O’Hehir looks beneath the surface of this year’s entries.

Donated duo

Dr Sarah Engledow writes about the gift of two striking paintings by the Australian artist Ken Done AM.

The existential lens

Stephen Zagala discusses Richard Avedon’s work from an Australian perspective.

Snap decisions

NPPP judge Robert Cook provides irreverent insight into this year’s fare, and having to be a bit judgemental.

20 20

Sarah Engledow picks some favourites from a decade of the National Photographic Portrait Prize.

More cash than dash

Joanna Gilmour describes how colonial portraitists found the perfect market among social status seeking Sydneysiders.

20/20 launch speech

Dr Helen Nugent AO, Chairman, National Portrait Gallery at the opening of 20/20: Celebrating twenty years with twenty new portrait commissions.

Getting bare

How seven portraits within Bare reveal in a public portrait parts of the body and elements of life usually located in the private sphere.

The Bare story

Curator, Penny Grist, reveals how this exhibition came to be

The Rothschilds, the Montefiores, and the Victorian Gold Rush

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.