National Portrait Gallery

National Portrait Gallery
Established	1856
Location	St Martin's Place, WC2, England
Collection size	10,000 portraits
Museum area	unknown
Visitor figures	1,500,000 (2005)[1]
Director	Sandy Nairne
Nearest tube station(s)	Charing Cross, Embankment, Leicester Square
Website	www.npg.org.uk

The National Portrait Gallery is an art gallery primarily located in St Martin's Place, off Trafalgar Square in London, but with various satellite outstations located elsewhere in the UK.

The collection

The gallery opened to the public in 1856. It houses portraits of historically important and famous British people, selected on the basis of the significance of the sitter. The collection includes photographs and caricatures as well as paintings, drawings and sculpture^[2].

Not all of the portraits are exceptional artistically, although there are self-portraits by William Hogarth, Sir Joshua Reynolds and other British artists of note. Some, such as the group portrait of the participants in the Somerset House Conference of 1604, are important historical documents in their own right. Often the curiosity value is greater than the artistic worth of a work, as in the case of the anamorphic portrait of Edward VI by William Scrots, Patrick Branwell Brontë's painting of his sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne, or a sculpture of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in medieval costume. Portraits of living figures were allowed from 1969.

The Gallery moved to its present building north of and adjacent to the National Gallery in 1896. It was designed by Ewan Christian in a Neo-Renaissance style, built by Shillitoe & Son^[3] and has been expanded twice. The first extension was funded by Lord Duveen in 1933, whose wing runs along Orange Street, and the second by Dr. Christopher Ondaatje in 2000. The Ondaatje Wing occupies a slither of land between the two 19th-century buildings of the National Gallery and the NPG and is notable for its immense, two-storey escalator that takes visitors to the earliest part of the collection, the Tudor portraits.

In addition to its permanent galleries of historical portraits, the National Portrait Gallery exhibits a rapidly changing collection of contemporary work, stages exhibitions of portrait art by individual artists and hosts the annual BP Portrait Prize competition.

References

Futher reading

Hulme, Graham, The National Portrait Gallery - An Architectural History, National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2000, ISBN 1 85514 293 7

See also

• The National Portrait Gallery Collects

External links

• Official web site
• The complete illustrated Catalogue
• National Portrait Gallery: A Visitor's Guide by John Cooper (New edition 2006)
• To search the collection
• NPG at Bodelwyddan Castle

Coordinates: 51°30′30″N, 0°07′46″W

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