Later Victorian Portraits

Work on the Gallery’s catalogue of Later Victorian Portraits began in 2005 supported by The Getty Foundation, with additional funding from The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.  With entries on the Gallery’s portraits of over 700 later Victorian sitters and comprehensive listings of their iconographies, this is the most ambitious of the Gallery’s cataloguing projects and will extend the period of what has been catalogued from the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries.   

The scale of the task 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 phase, soon to be published on this website, covers approximately 150 artists and art world figures.  It will include such major names as Aubrey Beardsley, William Holman Hunt, Lord Leighton, William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin and G.F. Watts.

As well as providing detailed accounts of the portraits of these individuals, the catalogue 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.