Venue: National Portrait Gallery, King Edward Terrace, Parkes, Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia Until Sunday 22 October 2017 This is the first exhibition to showcase the compelling watercolour images of English street people made by the itinerant English painter John Dempsey throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Featuring 52 rarely-seen portraits, the exhibition profiles […]
At the end of June, a colleague and I, attended the Understanding British Portraits seminar at the Geffrye Museum. We attended as part of a newly formed specialists’ records team here at The National Archives, looking specifically at our Design, Photographs and Art Collections. As the archive of central government, the records we hold cover […]
My application for my Understanding British Portraits Fellowship began with a simple question, ‘who are you?‘, which is what I thought the moment I saw the portrait of a young girl staring out so boldly from the canvas. Little did I know what an amazing person I had come across. The portrait of The Honourable […]
I attended this seminar at the National Portrait Gallery, keen to develop our work with portraits at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath. Portraits are one of our most popular subjects with schools and nurseries. I was also looking forward to seeing more of the work of Howard Hodgkin the National Portrait Gallery exhibition: Howard […]
During the recent Understanding British Portraits Study Day at Weston Park, we were expertly guided through the collection by Gareth Williams, Curator & Head of Learning, and Sally Goodsir, who has undertaken a thorough analysis of the provenance and hang of the pictures. Working on a similar project at Woburn Abbey, it was exciting to […]
Press release announcement from The Grosvenor Museum, Chester, 21 April 2017: A glamorous portrait of one of Cheshire’s most interesting 20th-century aristocrats has gone on display at Chester’s Grosvenor Museum. The portrait of Sybil, Countess of Rocksavage, later Marchioness of Cholmondeley, was painted by Charles Sims in 1922. The painting was purchased with support from […]
As somebody whose own specialism is not actually in art history (but rather in historic houses and other buildings), I was very keen to attend the portrait study day at Weston Park, not only to enjoy privileged access to the house and collections, but also to benefit from the in-depth knowledge of their curator—Gareth Williams—and […]
The Geffrye Museum of the Home has recently purchased a beautiful, large-scale watercolour portrait of two young sisters in a domestic interior by the late Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Robert Hughes. Today Hughes is best-known for his ‘blue’ paintings – a series of spectacular, highly finished watercolours on literary and mystical themes, featuring winged allegorical figures […]
In December I returned to the National Portrait Gallery, where I had worked for 3 years until last autumn, to attend the annual Understanding British Portraits conference. On the agenda was a talk by Ibby Lanfear, Paintings Conservator, which focused on a collection of 17th-century portraits here at the Charterhouse. It was a wonderful experience […]
The Grosvenor Museum’s greatest acquisition in 2015 was a portrait of Richard Crewe-Milnes, Earl of Madeley, the three-year-old son of the 1st Marquess of Crewe, painted in 1914 by Philip de László, one of the most celebrated portrait painters of his age. This masterly oil sketch exemplifies the artist’s painterly panache and retains its original […]
