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| You are in: National Portrait Gallery | Search the collection | Room 25 | |||||||||
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Room 25 Portraits and Politics Portraits of politicians reveal much about how the Victorians regarded their great public figures and recorded political allegiances between the sitter and those who commissioned the paintings. For Sir Robert Peel, painted by John Linnell, portraiture served as a way of permanently honouring those with whom he had worked most closely during his political career. During his last administration, from 1841 to 1846, Peel commissioned a number of portraits of his political associates and built a gallery for their display at his country house, Drayton Manor. Three of these - Derby, Ellenborough and Newcastle - now hang outside this room in the central corridor which is itself intended to evoke the idea of a 'statesmen's gallery'. Peel insisted that his portraits should be characterised by a sober plainness and a feeling of contemporaneity. Several decades later, these same qualities can be seen in Millais' paintings of those two great adversaries of later Victorian politics: Gladstone and Disraeli. Severe and serious works, they show their subjects in everyday dress and abandon all accessories or indications of office. Other works in this room show a less formal approach. Chamberlain and Balfour lounge on a Commons bench in a painting by The Graphic journalist Sydney Prior Hall, while Emslie's 'Dinner at Haddo House' offers a glimpse of a late Victorian gathering. Caricatures, notably for the society magazine Vanity Fair, were another way in which the political personalities of the period were represented to the Victorian public. Portraits on display |
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protection. 21 August 2008 |
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