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Showing character

Joanna Gilmour on Tom Durkin playing with Melbourne's manhood.

Political profiles

Joanna Gilmour examines the prolific output of Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin, and discovers the risk of taking a portrait at face value.

Sir Thomas Gore-Browne, 1864

Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 2018

The medallion

In recent years I have become fascinated by the so-called Sydney Cove Medallion (1789), a work of art that bridges the 10,000-mile gap between the newly established penal settlement at Port Jackson and the beating heart of Enlightenment England.

200 Years of Portraiture

To celebrate his family bicentenary, Malcolm Robertson looks at the portraiture legacy left by his ancestors.

Giving and getting

The exhibition Portraits for Posterity celebrates gifts to the Gallery, of purchases made with donated funds, and testifies to the generosity and community spirit of Australians.

Love my way

Inga Walton delves into the bohemian group of artists and writers who used each other as muses and transformed British culture.

Apollo's breath

Christopher Chapman delights in the intimacy of Robert Mapplethorpe's photography

Heartfelt

The portrait of Janet and Horace Keats with the spirit of the poet Christopher Brennan is brought to life by artist Dora Toovey.

Presence and absence

The art of Australia’s colonial women painters affords us an invaluable, alternative perspective on the nascent nation-building project.

Moving still

Anne O’Hehir on the seductive power of the film still to reflect and shape ourselves and our cultural landscape.

A rogue's calling card

Joanna Gilmour explores the stories behind the ninteenth-century carte de visites of bushrangers Frank Gardiner and Fred Lowry.

A feast of friends

John Singer Sargent: a painter at the vanguard of contemporary movements in music, literature and theatre.

In a good paddock

Celebrating a new painted portrait of Joseph Banks, Sarah Engledow spins a yarn of the naturalist, the first kangaroo in France and Don, a Spanish ram.

The bright-eyed Mariner

Beguiling impressions

Sarah Engledow is seduced by the portraits and the connections between the artists and their subjects in the exhibition Impressions: Painting light and life.