Faces and Places

Faces and Places is an opportunity to investigate our world-class Collection of portraits in your classroom. You and your pupils can discover inspiring people connected to your local area and explore what portraiture can reveal about ourselves, each other, our locality and our past and present. Faces and Places is designed to support cross-curricular teaching with a focus on Art & Design and History. You can use the portraits to explore local history and connections, improve visual literacy and critical thinking skills, support the teaching of the rich diversity of British history and develop ideas around portrait-making.

Find out how significant people are connected to the local area and explore ways that portraits can reveal ideas and clues about the sitter (person in the portrait). Look closely to discover clues that the artist is giving about the person in the portrait, their life and achievements.

Click on the portraits to find out more about each of the sitters.

Here are some ideas to explore the Faces and Places portraits with your class

Investigate the portraits using these questions as prompts and record this discussion as a list or mind map.

• Start by looking at all ten of the portraits.
• Is there anyone your class recognises?
• Are they well known in the local area?
• What do we know about them?
• What would the class like to find out about them?
• Can we find out anything from looking at their portrait?
• Think about what a portrait is. For example ‘a document recording a moment in time’, ‘an intentional recording of a person’. See how these apply to the ten portraits.
• Discuss the different ways we make portraits of ourselves and each other. Which techniques and art forms are included in the ten portraits?
• Click on each portrait to reveal key information and further questions to discover more.

Each school term the borough’s ten portraits will be revealed ahead of the outreach delivery in Brent, Lambeth, Westminster, Haringey, Lewisham, Waltham Forest, and Barking and Dagenham.

Face and Places Learning Resource KS1-5
Use this resource to creatively explore local history and connections, portraits and portrait making, and the diversity of British history. This resource includes topics, activities and ideas accessible for all key stages and abilities.

Explore the boroughs below:

Brent >  Lambeth >  Haringey >  Westminster >  Lewisham >  Waltham Forest >  Barking and Dagenham >

Funded by The National Heritage Lottery Fund and Art Fund