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 […]
1857 was an annus mirabilis for both George Scharf (1820-1895) and the cultural life of the United Kingdom due to his crucial role in two watershed events: the foundation of the National Portrait Gallery and the staging of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition. A new database devoted to Scharf’s activities during this period has now […]
![Silvia Constance Myers and Leopold Hamilton Myers by Eveleen Myers (née Tennant) [the sitters' mother], platinum print, c.1890 © National Portrait Gallery, London](https://www.britishportraits.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/mw150347.jpg)
Judy Oberhausen first met Eveleen Myers (née Tennant, 1856-1937) many years ago at the Delaware Art Museum when she was a young intern working with the Bancroft Collection of Pre-Raphaelite Art. George Frederic Watts’s portrait of Myers as the fresh-faced Jessamine is still there in a gallery filled with other famous Pre-Raphaelite beauties – although […]
On Thursday 22nd January, I travelled to the Heinz Archive along with a colleague, Euan, as part of our Understanding British Portraits project. The portrait in question is of Richard Francis Burton, the famous Victorian explorer, in disguise as Haji Abdullah on his expedition to Mecca in 1853. Our aim was to use the archives […]
In February 2014, Sir Thomas Lawrence’s double portrait of Frances Anne, Marchioness of Londonderry and her son, Lord Seaham, was temporarily allocated through Acceptance In Lieu to Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland, by Arts Council England (left). It arrived along with a significant loan of other items from the Estate of the Marquess of Londonderry […]
With so little known about many of the nineteenth and early twentieth century portraits in the Russell-Cotes collection, the Understanding British Portraits Bursary presented the perfect opportunity to discover more, with the aim of creating a primary school offer focused on portraits as a result of this research. We were aware, for example, of two […]
The nineteenth century was a period of great opportunity for men of energy and aspiration, the middling classes in the North of England grew in power thanks to the Industrial Revolution and the Reform Act of 1832. The middle classes saw the need for self improvement and culture, becoming important patrons for artists. There is […]
Queen Caroline has proudly surveyed the Octagon Room at Orleans House Gallery since we opened 40 years ago. Given our dynamic exhibition programme, she’s the only part of the Richmond Borough Art Collection that you are guaranteed to see every time you visit. We love to share stories about the occasion in 1729 when she […]
