Later Victorian Portraits Catalogue

The first entries of the Gallery's Later Victorian Portraits Catalogue are now available on the website. The size of this part of the collection has guided our approach to researching the catalogue and the decision that this will be the first of the Gallery’s period catalogues to be published online. Rather than following an A-Z sequence, research has been conducted according to subject or vocational area. This will allow us to publish the catalogue in phased tranches which will be coherent in themselves.

The first two phases – entries on artists and art world figures and entries on travellers and explorers – are now online.  The former includes major names such as Julia Margaret Cameron, William Morris, John Ruskin and James McNeill Whistler while the latter contains entries for Gertrude Bell, Sir Richard Burton and H.M. Stanley.

The catalogue provides detailed accounts of the portraits of these individuals in the Gallery’s collection and comprehensive listings of other known portraits of them in all media. The catalogue therefore contributes to our understanding of portraiture during what was the first age of portrait photography and the mass dissemination of portrait images of the famous.

Other areas of national life that we wish to catalogue are subject to obtaining funding:

• Literature
• Engineers
• Scientists
• Medicine
• Armed Forces
• Politics and public life

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Aubrey Vincent Beardsley
by Frederick Henry Evans
1894
NPG P114