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PAST EXHIBITION ARCHIVE
Born in 1856
28 January - 3 August 2006
Showcase display
Room 24 - Victorian Galleries
Admission free

George Bernard Shaw
by Sir Bernard Partridge, 1894
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This display focuses on the generation
of exceptional individuals who were born in 1856, the year the
National Portrait Gallery was founded. George Bernard Shaw, John
Singer Sargent, Keir Hardie and Sigmund Freud are all included
alongside less well-known figures who have nevertheless made
a significant impact on the way we live today. They include Annie
Rogers, the promoter of women's higher education, Sir Joseph
John Thomson, the Nobel prize winning physicist, and William
Willett, the inventor of daylight saving.
Most of these sitters made their
mark in the twentieth century yet they were born at a time when
Queen Victoria's own family was still expanding and Britain was
embroiled in the Crimean War. Their lives form a bridge between
the seemingly distant era of the mid-nineteenth century and a
recognisably modern period with the development of the Labour
Party, psychoanalysis and subatomic physics.
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