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The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders both past and present.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are warned that this website contains images of deceased persons.

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About Face articles

Professor Mandyam Srinivasan

Brains trust

About Face article

Eminent doctors and scientists have for more than a century consistently caused our nation to punch far above her weight.

Lord Kitchener

Lord Kitchener

Imperial strategist

About Face article

Once central to military strategy and venerated in patriotic households, Lord Kitchener is now largely forgotten.

Queen Victoria (1819-1901), Signed and dated 1843 by Franz Xaver Winterhalter

Queen Victoria

About Face article

Last Sunday I had the privilege of appearing at the Canberra Writers’ Festival in conversation with Julia Baird. The subject of our session was Julia’s recent biography, Victoria the Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman who Ruled an Empire.

Trumble's way

About Face article

At the end of a summer break one is tempted to say that there is nothing much to report. Isn’t one restful holiday very much like another?

Angus and the late Peter C. Trumble, 1965, still then a firm advocate of the detachable collar.

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.

Louise, daughter of the Hon. L. L. Smith by Tom Roberts, 1888

An Australian in Paris

About Face article

This week it is impossible not to contemplate the ways in which France has touched many Australian lives.

Thomas Woolner

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 Triumph of Death, c. 1562 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

The Black Death

About Face article

The best horror stories are real. A flea sinks its proboscis into the skin of a sick black rat, feeds on its blood, and ingests lethally multiplying bacteria.

Canberra Close Up: Angus Trumble

Desert Island Discs

About Face article

I agonized over the choice of four songs to take with me to the ABC Studios for Alex Sloan’s Canberra 666 afternoon program, a sort of iteration of the old BBC Desert Island Discs.

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.

A Family Being Served with Tea, ca. 1745 by an unknown artist

A reflection on conversation pieces

About Face article

There is in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, an English painting, datable on the basis of costume to about 1745, that has for many years exercised my imagination.

Mexico from the Palace painted by ‘Maximilian Emperor'

Empirical art

About Face article

Several years ago I came across this curious painting on the racks in a distant, dusty corner of the store room in the basement of the Johannesburg Art Gallery in South Africa. Since then the mystery surrounding it has never been far from my mind.

Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza and David R. L. Litchfield at Villa Favorita, Lugano, Switzerland, 1989 © Nicola Graydo

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.

On the passage and pace of time

About Face article

In shock it fluctuates and with age, accelerates. Remembering the First World War and the Easter Rising.

Trumble and Borthwick families (Mum front right, Angus smallest), ca. 1968

Humdinger

About Face article

At a meeting by teleconference of the National Portrait Gallery Foundation last week, I found myself reporting that our forthcoming exhibition So Fine is going to be “a humdinger,” whereupon Tim Fairfax chuckled and said that he hadn’t heard that expression for years.

Cooey: an Australian song

Cooey! An Australian Song

About Face article

"Coo-ey, Coo-ey, Coo-ey, Coo-ey—Love has caught the strain, Coo-ey, Coo-ey, Coo-ey, Coo-ey—it whispers back again." The “Australian lady” who composed these fruity lyrics was none other than Desda— Jane Davies, sometime Messiter (née Price) of Leddicott, Lavender Bay.

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The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders past and present. We respectfully advise that this site includes works by, images of, names of, voices of and references to deceased people.

This website comprises and contains copyrighted materials and works. Copyright in all materials and/or works comprising or contained within this website remains with the National Portrait Gallery and other copyright owners as specified.

The National Portrait Gallery respects the artistic and intellectual property rights of others. The use of images of works of art reproduced on this website and all other content may be restricted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (Cth). Requests for a reproduction of a work of art or other content can be made through a Reproduction request. For further information please contact NPG Copyright.

The National Portrait Gallery is an Australian Government Agency