The Ballroom at Knole, Sevenoaks, Kent. © National Trust Images/Andreas von Einsiedel

Portrait News Category

Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art during Slavery

  Jennifer Van Horne’s Portraits of Resistance tells a new history of American art: how enslaved people mobilized portraiture for acts of defiance. Revisiting the origins of portrait painting in the United States, Van Horn reveals how mythologies of whiteness and of nation building erased the aesthetic production of enslaved Americans of African descent and obscured […]

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Cézanne Portrait discovered behind a Still Life of Bread and Eggs

  The Cincinnati Art Museum has discovered that underneath Cezanne’s Still Life With Bread And Eggs lies a portait, potentially a self-portrait. Serena Urry, the museums chief conservator, sent the painting for an X-ray following a routine inspection. Whilst early craquelure was unsurpirinsg, it’s clustering into two specific areas raised eyebrows. The X-ray as seen […]

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Portrait of Britain Vol. 5 Winners Announced

Currently covering the walls of London’s underground, bus shelters and highstreets, Portrait of Britain is a “celebration of identity; an opportunity to rejoice in the diversity of a changing nation”. The British Journal of Photography has announced the winners of Portrait of Britain Vol.5, an annual photography competition which is open to applications to all amateur photographers. With support […]

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Pre-Raphaelite painting by Rebecca Solomon at risk of leaving the UK

    A temporary export bar has been placed on Rebecca Solomon’s portrait of Fanny Eaton. Solomon was a pioneering Jewish painter who campaigned for women artists. In  ‘A Young Teacher’ Fanny Eaton, whose mother was a former enslaved woman in Jamaica, poses as an Indian nursemaid. The piece provides a nuanced and sensitive perspective […]

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‘Sasha Huber: You Name It’ at Autograph, London

  Sasha Huber: YOU NAME IT’ is now open at Autograph, London. Open until the 23rd March 2023, the exhibition explores how colonial histories are imprinted into the landscape through naming and acts of remembrance – asking what actions it might take to repair the inherited traumas of history.     Bringing together over a […]

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Ignatius Sancho: A Portrait at Gainsborough’s House.

  In 1768 Thomas Gainsborough painted the portrait of Ignatius Sancho (c. 1729-1780), who was then valet to the Duke of Montagu. The portrait of Sancho is a rare depiction of a black man in eighteenth-century Europe shown not as an enslaved person, servant or caricature, but as a gentleman. After Sancho’s death, the portrait […]

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‘Portraiture of Self and Others’ from the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2022

New Contemporaries returns to the South London Gallery for the fifth consecutive year with Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2022. This year’s exhibition features 47 of the UK’s most exciting artists emerging from art schools and alternative peer-to-peer learning programmes. The 2022 cohort were selected by internationally renowned artists James Richards, Veronica Ryan and Zadie Xa from […]

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Tudor Mystery: A Master Painter Revealed at Compton Verney

  Inspired by Compton Verney Gallery’s striking portrait of Sir Thomas Knyvett (c.1569), ‘Tudor Mystery: A Master Painter Revealed’ is the world’s first exhibition devoted to an important, talented – but almost completely forgotten – painter at the court of Elizabeth I. Although the artist’s name has been lost, his recognisable approach to capturing a […]

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The Health of the Munition Worker

      As part of The Devil’s Porridge Museum’s Disability: Past and Present project, a new exhibition: ‘The Health of the Munition Worker: A Disability History of the World Wars on the Solway Military Coast’, will be on show from 1st November 2022 – 31st March 2023.               […]

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Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize Winners Announced

The winners of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize were announced at Cromwell Place on the 25th of October 2022.                 Clémentine Schneidermann took first place for the series Laundry Day which depict the artist’s neighbour hanging laundry in the garden of her home in South Wales. Taken during another […]

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