Juliet Pannett: Chronicler of her Times
Marie Rambert
by Juliet Pannett
1960s?
NPG 6039
Past display archive
8 December 2004 - 15 June 2005
Room 31
Free
The portrait painter Juliet Pannett was born in Hove in 1911 and is one of the oldest living artists to have work in the National Portrait Gallery collection. Throughout her long and prolific career she has recorded the faces of the great and good including many Prime Ministers, politicians, lawyers, judges, academics and musicians.
Pannett studied at Brighton College of Art in the 1920s and received her first portrait commission at the age of eighteen from Sussex County Magazine. She was employed to travel around the county drawing local characters, from blacksmiths and rabbit catchers to horse-cab drivers and Crimean war-veterans.
In 1934 Pannett was elected a member of the Society of Graphic Artists and began teaching at a girl's school near Crawley. She acquired her first studio in a mews in Hove and began her foreign travels with trips to Spain, Germany and Italy; a passion that was to last a lifetime. Forced to give up painting at the beginning of the Second World War, Pannett returned to it with enthusiasm in subsequent years and from 1957-64 was Special Artist to the Illustrated London News.
In 1989, at the age of 78, Pannett was commissioned to paint the Queen at Buckingham Palace. She has exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and was awarded an MBE in 1993.
This display brings together a selection of Pannett's drawings from the 1950s, 60s and 70s in celebration of this her ninety-fourth year.
Related portraits
- Sir Arthur Keith (NPG 3986)
- Ralph Vaughan Williams (NPG 4074)
- Gordon Jacob (NPG 5760)
- Marie Rambert (NPG 6039)
- Sir (Edward) Ian Claud Jacob (NPG 6037)
- Herbert Stanley Morrison, Baron Morrison of Lambeth (NPG 4476)
- Sir Henry Hallett Dale (NPG 5759)
- Winston Churchill (NPG 4474)
- Sir Philip Louis Vian (NPG 5764)
- Sir Thomas Armstrong (NPG 6034)
- Arnold Joseph Toynbee (NPG 5762)
- Sir Fred Hoyle (NPG 6036)
Related sitters
- Sir Thomas Henry Wait Armstrong
- Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill
- Sir Henry Hallett Dale
- Sir Fred Hoyle
- Gordon Jacob
- Sir (Edward) Ian Claud Jacob
- Sir Arthur Keith
- Herbert Stanley Morrison, Baron Morrison of Lambeth
- Dame Marie Rambert (Dame Marie Dukes)
- Arnold Joseph Toynbee
- Ralph Vaughan Williams
- Sir Philip Louis Vian