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Some women you may not know

‘Everybody’s lives are built by so many influences, and for me, it is writers, artists and activists who have influenced how I think about the world.’

Past present

Krysia Kitch celebrates Oodgeroo Noonuccal.

Self-effacing

Michael Wardell samples the fare in the University of Queensland National Self-portrait Prize.

Air wear

Aviation carried women’s roles in society to greater heights – fashion followed suit.

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.

2023 Annual Appeal

In 2023 the Annual Appeal was focussed on a work by one of Australia's best loved and most successful portrait painters, Judy Cassab AO CBE, depicting model, entrepreneur and deportment icon, June Dally-Watkins OAM.

Give me five

National Portrait Gallery director Karen Quinlan AM nominates her quintet of favourites from the collection, with early twentieth-century ‘selfies’ filling the roster.

Annual Appeal

Citizen Kenne

April Thompson explores an exhibition of Ingvar Kenne’s global portrait project.

Poets' Portraits

The Portrait Gallery's paintings of two poets, Les Murray and Peter Porter, demonstrate two very different artists' responses to the challenge of representing more than usually sensitive and imaginative men.

Material culture

The Rajah Quilt’s narrative promptings are as intriguing as the textile is intricate.

The Lawrence lustre

Angus Trumble salutes the glorious portraiture of Sir Thomas Lawrence.

A reflection on conversation pieces

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.

Starry knight

Aircraft designer, pilot and entrepreneur, Sir Lawrence Wackett rejoins friends and colleagues on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery.

Portrait Donors

Christmas Island

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.