The Gallery holds the most extensive collection of portraits in the world. Search over 215,000 works, 150,000 of which are illustrated from the 16th Century to the present day.

Advanced Collection search

Blog

Archived posts

Florence Nightingale National Trust

Without her lacy cap: Researching images of Florence Nightingale

A mansion in leafy Buckinghamshire is an odd place to find portraits of Florence Nightingale, since for much of her life after the Crimean War she was too ill to leave London. But by the 1880s she was sufficiently recovered to visit (with cats) her older sister Parthenope Verney at Claydon House. In the Rococo and Gothic glory of that house Florence had her own suite, and the privacy to work and to write.…

By Carol Blackett-Ord, Researcher (Later Victorian Catalogue)

13 November 2014

Famous Faces on display at Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens

Famous Faces in Newcastle – Jonathan Yeo Portraits and Starring Vivien Leigh

This winter, the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne will be home to a host of famous faces from the worlds of film, television, politics, media and art in two contrasting exhibitions from the National Portrait Gallery (on display from 8 November 2014 until 15 February 2015). This programme is the most recent in a long-term partnership between the NPG and museums and galleries in the North East of England. Even as these two exhibitions open at the Laing, the BP Portrait Award 2014 is on display at Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens (until 16 November) and a spectacular group of portraits from the NPG collection introduce the exhibition Screaming Steel: Art, War and Trauma 1914-1918 at the Hatton Gallery at Newcastle University (until 13 December).…

By Amy Barker, Curator of the Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead

07 November 2014