National Portrait Gallery

Catherine of Aragon, by an Unknown artist, oil on panel, c. 1520, L246. By permission of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Church Commissioners.

Henry and Catherine Reunited

The recent conservation of a rare early portrait of Catherine of Aragon, which is on long-term loan from Lambeth Palace, has presented the Gallery with the opportunity to display portraits of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon together as a pendant ‘pair’. The two works, from around the same date, are of a similar scale with a similar green damask background, and it is likely that they are both examples of portrait ‘types’ that would have been placed together in this way, nearly five hundred years ago.…

By Charlotte Bolland, Project Curator (Making Art in Tudor Britain)

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30 January 2013

Fred Daniels: New Research

The Gallery’s long interest in the life and career of British film-stills photographer Fred Daniels began in 1988, with the important acquisition of works from the photographer’s widow Nancy Eckart. In 2010, Nigel Arthur, BFI Stills Curator, was awarded a grant from the Understanding British Portraits Network to research Daniels’s work more fully, particularly with new information from his son, Jonty. Since then we have discovered many unknown studies by Daniels that were published in leading society magazines of the 1940s and 1950s.…

By Helen Trompeteler, Assistant Curator of Photographs

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6 December 2012

The artist never lies?

How much control do we have over our images? When we view a portrait, do we expect it to depict someone as they are or as they’d like to be? Would you feel differently if it was a portrait of you? These questions struck me when I was looking at William Hoare’s portrait of Alexander Pope for our new display, The Art of Drawing: Portraits from the collection, 1670-1850. …

By Clare Barlow, Assistant Curator

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28 November 2012

On being painted by Humphrey Ocean

Humphrey Ocean, whose display A handbook of modern life opens at the Gallery this month, began making a series of portraits of visitors to his south London studio – friends, family and people he knows – in 2006; a diverse group who now number almost two hundred. The portraits share a format, and by using gouache, a kind of thickened watercolour, on paper, Ocean can work very swiftly. None of the portraits took more than forty-five minutes. …

By Rosie Broadley, Associate Curator

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22 November 2012

The Judges' View: Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2012

The great strength of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize is that it brings together a wide of images, from reportage and documentary photographs to studio portraits. This year some 5,000 photographs were submitted for the competition. As chair of the selection panel, I encourage my fellow judges (this year Emma Hardy, Lauren Heinz, Glyn Morgan, Sean O’Hagan and Terence Pepper) to hold individual opinions and to argue for the works they find particularly appealing. Consensus on the final selection is always reached, but the exhibition is more diverse as a result of this debate.…

By Sandy Nairne, Director, National Portrait Gallery

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6 November 2012

The Hearse of Henry, Prince of Wales by William Hole, 1612 © The Trustees of the British Museum

Rediscovering Henry’s ‘body’

One of the most memorable visits I made during research for the exhibition was to see a distinctly dilapidated object at Westminster Abbey. Shortly after his death – probably from typhoid fever, at the age of 18 – an effigy of the prince was made to be carried on his coffin in his funeral procession in December 1612. It had originally consisted of a carved wooden body, padded out probably with straw inside a fabric ‘skin’, which was dressed in the robes he had worn when he was created Prince of Wales. The face and hands were probably made of wax, and the whole thing was regarded as so life-like that its first arrival at the Abbey elicited a huge outbreak of weeping among the mourners.…

By Catharine MacLeod, 17th Century Curator