'For Richer for Poorer,
for Better for Worse’:

A display featuring reproductions of a variety of portraits from the Gallery’s Collection will be shown at this year’s Latitude Festival. All portraits included in the display relate to this year’s Latitude theme: ‘For richer for poorer, for better for worse’. As part of the festival, the National Portrait Gallery's Choir in Residence, The Portrait Choir, will give a performance of music and readings inspired by the display.

One of the greatest British composers of the twentieth century, Benjamin Britten is depicted in this double-portrait with his partner, the tenor Peter Pears. Having met in 1939, Britten and Pears became lifelong companions as well as one of the most celebrated voice and piano duos of the post-war period. In 1979 Pears described their relationship as ‘a life of the two of us’.

The Armenian photographer Ida Kar met Victor Musgrave in 1942 in Cairo where he was serving as an RAF officer. They moved to London after the war where Kar’s photography was acclaimed and Musgrave became one of the leading art dealers of the 1950s and 60s. Their home in London’s Soho became a well-known meeting place for artists, bohemians and political radicals.

The actress Ellen Terry was sixteen when she married George Frederic Watts, the artist of this deeply romantic portrait. The painting was completed in the year of their wedding, and the ‘choice’ of the title is between worldly vanities and higher virtues. On her marriage, Terry gave up performing. A mutual friend described the relationship as ‘absurd’: ‘he might as well marry the dawn or the twilight or any other evanescent and elusive loveliness of nature’. The couple separated after less than a year and Terry returned to the stage. Today she is remembered as one of the leading actresses of the period.

Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas became lovers in 1892. Douglas is primarily remembered for bringing about Wilde's downfall in 1895 by encouraging him to sue Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensbury, for his accusation that Wilde was homosexual. The case collapsed and led to Wilde's conviction for 'gross indecency'. After serving two years in Reading gaol, Wilde fled the country and died a broken man in Paris.

Hall’s semi-autobiographical novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) became immediately famous for her frank portrayal of its lesbian central relationship. It was banned, despite protests from Virginia Woolf and other writers, and was not reprinted in Britain until 1949. Hall was courageously controversial. Her first name was Marguerite but she preferred to be called 'John’. At a time when male homosexuality was illegal, she lived openly with a woman. In this portrait Hall’s short hair, masculine jacket, cravat and monocle, proclaim her defiance of convention.

This photograph shows Audrey Hepburn on the cusp of becoming an international star. She is in costume for The Secret People, an early major film, in which she played a ballet dancer. Her performance led to a screen test for Roman Holiday, in which she would have the starring role opposite Gregory Peck.

The romantic poet John Keats had a tragically short career. This portrait was painted in Rome following his death from tuberculosis in the artist's arms at the age of 25. Many years later Severn wrote of this event that 'the impression was so painful on my mind that I made an effort to call up the most pleasant remembrance in this picture’.

This portrait shows two of the nineteenth century’s leading liberal intellectuals. Millicent Fawcett was an author and a leading figure in the women’s suffrage movement; she became president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in 1897. Her husband, Henry Fawcett was an advocate of radical causes and Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge. He had been blinded in a shooting accident in 1858. The artist wrote that this portrait was ‘full of character & pathos’.