The University of Sheffield and the National Portrait Gallery are inviting applications for a Collaborative Doctoral Award on the subject of The Female Miniaturist 1680-1840: Recovering Lives, Practices and Representations. Funded by the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities (WRoCAH), this project investigates an overlooked aspect of female artistic practice: the portrait miniature. […]
This summer, the Warburg Institute is offering the online short course Painting Icons: A History of the Portrait from Byzantium to Basquiat. Taking in some of the biggest names in the history of art, as well as some less well-known figures, the course will also explore how, by specialising in portraiture, certain artists throughout the centuries became […]
An exquisite oil on copper miniature depicting a noblewoman in gold-embroidered finery against a blue background is currently on display at Strawberry Hill House. Previously attributed to Bronzino, recent analysis has indicated that it may have been made in the final decades of the 1500s by Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614), the Bolognese painter widely considered Europe’s […]
We are very pleased to share a new film produced by one of our 2024 Fellows, Kate Haselden, which illustrates her research into one of the only examples of a portrait depicting an individual Black person within National Museums Liverpool’s collection: William Lindsay Windus’ The Black Boy (1844). In her project, Kate examined this striking portrait of an unnamed […]
This online Research Spotlight provides a new resource on the portrait of the politician Richard Cobden by the artist Emma Aloysia Novello. Painted in Paris in 1861, the portrait materialises the alliance between Cobden and the Novello family that contributed to the Paper Duty Repeal Bill; part of the ultimately successful campaign against ‘Taxes on Knowledge’. […]
A workshop taking place in September 2024 and hosted by the Centre for Museum Cultures at Birkbeck and the National Portrait Gallery will facilitate critical engagement with the topic of empire and the art gallery. The workshop will address how to publicly communicate imperial legacies within art galleries, bringing together people working across the sector to […]
Fruit of Friendship: Portraits by Mary Beale opened at Philip Mould & Company in London on Thursday 25 April 2024. Mary Beale (1633-1699) was one of Britain’s first professional woman artists. This exhibition will feature twenty-five of her works from public and private collections. The exhibition will span her entire career and include self-portraits, portraits of […]
This year’s Association of Dress Historians International Conference will take place at the National Portrait Gallery on 7-8 October 2024. Exploring the theme of Dress and Painting: Clothing and Textiles in Art, the conference aims to bring together scholars, professionals, and practitioners to explore and examine the wide range of interconnections between dress, textiles and […]
Every edition of the Understanding British Portraits Annual Seminar provides an energising environment for exchanging ideas on the latest research into portraiture, and the 2023 seminar proved to be an especially revitalising occasion. This was the first annual seminar that I had been able to attend since the pandemic and I was deeply impressed by […]
The National Portrait Gallery has recently launched a project to identify, and find the identities of, sitters from the global majority in historic British portraiture using the Gallery’s Heinz Archive and Library. This relates to all sitters who were racialized as ‘other than White’ by the society they lived in (particularly those of African and […]
