Making Faces - Eighteenth Century Style

Making Faces - Eighteenth Century Style continues on the top floor with three more galleries. With portraits by great eighteenth-century artists like Sir Joshua Reynolds, Angelica Kauffmann and Thomas Gainsborough, you can investigate the different ways and reasons that Portraits Tell Stories - and decide whether they always tell the truth.

In Getting the Picture, the next hands-on gallery, you can visit the artist's studio and gallery and explore the concerns and issues involved in commissioning and producing an oil portrait in the eighteenth century. Choose the artist you prefer to paint your portrait in Shopping Around; have a Virtual Portrait made which you can then email home, and learn the tricks that artists employed to get the job done in Finishing Off.

Turning Heads, the last of the Making Faces interactive galleries, brings portrait sculpture to life. In Hands-on Heads you can explore two portraits by touch finding all the hidden details; in Three Men in Togas you can handle three giant ears to compare the different materials that sculptors used and in Nose Job you can try your hand at modelling a new nose for a Yorkshire hero.

For those visiting with younger children there is also a Pre-School Portrait Playroom where you and your kids can have fun dressing up, doing jigsaws - and lots of other activities based around portraits

Download In focus - Getting The Picture:
Shopping Around | A Portrait Sitting | Finishing Off

Download In focus - Turning Heads:
Turning Heads | Hands-On Heads | Copying Captain Cook

Go to a large print, text-only version of this site

All images and text are subject to copyright protection. 22 November 2008