- of 10,000 portraits in our main Primary Collection is now available on CD-ROM, in a new version of our Complete Illustrated Catalogue and illustrated in a wide variety of other books, available from our online shop
- is the most comprehensive of its kind in the world
- shows the most influential characters in British history portrayed by the finest artists of their generation
- runs to some 10,000 items in our Primary Collection, with a further 320,000 in the archive
- includes works by Holbein, Van Dyck & Reynolds, through Gainsborough, Millais & Tissot, to Cecil Beaton, David Bailey & Patrick Heron
- includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, engravings and photographs
- demonstrates the history of British portraiture from its beginning, through the contortions of caricature and the crisis caused by the advent of photography, to the edge of abstraction.
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You can use our simple search to find
- pictures of particular people (or 'sitters')
- pictures by particular artists or
- particular pictures, by their titles.
There are other ways
to search the collection - you can read
search help or try the
advanced search to find out more.
If the results of your search include an image, this will appear at the top of the page.
Results are also sorted by date, and according to their place in our collection.
Results do no always include an image due to copyright restrictions. There are programmes in place
to clear copyright and digitise more of our
collection.
The online database contains information on 113,519 works, 57,952 of which are illustrated;
the National Portrait Gallery's collection includes over 330,000 works. We are expanding this database regularly - last updated June 2008.
If you want to buy prints or license images and cannot find what you are looking for, please contact the Picture Library. For other enquiries concerning portraits, please refer to the Archive & Library page.
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