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Information about National Portrait Gallery, London

National Portrait Gallery
Established1856
LocationSt Martin's Place, WC2, England
Collection size10,000 portraits
Museum area unknown
Visitor figures 1,500,000 (2005)[1]
Director Sandy Nairne
Nearest tube station(s)Charing Cross, Embankment, Leicester Square
Websitewww.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 Some, such as the group portrait of the participants in the Somerset House Conference of 1604, are important historical documents in their own right.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

External links

 •  • [ e]
Museums and galleries in London
Apsley House Barbican Art Gallery British Museum Burgh House Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms Percival David Foundation Design Museum Dulwich Picture Gallery Estorick Collection Foundling Museum Freud Museum Geffrye Museum Guildhall Art Gallery Handel House Museum Hayward Gallery HMS Belfast Hogarth's House Horniman Museum Imperial War Museum Institute of Contemporary Arts London Transport Museum Museum in Docklands Museum of London National Gallery National Maritime Museum National Portrait Gallery Natural History Museum Petrie Museum Queen's Gallery Royal Academy of Arts Royal Collection Saatchi Gallery Science Museum Serpentine Gallery Sir John Soane's Museum Somerset House – Courtauld Gallery, Gilbert Collection, Hermitage Rooms Sutton House Tate Britain Tate Modern Victoria and Albert Museum V&A Museum of Childhood Wallace Collection Whitechapel Art Gallery


Coordinates:
18th century - 19th century - 20th century
1820s  1830s  1840s  - 1850s -  1860s  1870s  1880s
1853 1854 1855 - 1856 - 1857 1858 1859

:
Subjects:     Archaeology - Architecture -
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London WC postcode area


Postcode area WC
Postcode area name London WC
Post towns 1
Postcode districts 15
Postcode sectors 45
Postcodes (live) 3,512
Postcodes (total) 7,033
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Motto
Dieu et mon droit   (French)
"God and my right"
Anthem
No official anthem specific to England — the anthem of the United Kingdom is "God Save the Queen".
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Alexander Robert "Sandy" Nairne (born June 8, 1953) is a British museum director and writer and since 2002 Director of the National Portrait Gallery. The son of a senior civil servant, Nairne studied at University College, Oxford in the early 1970s and rowed for the Oxford
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Charing Cross
The mural along the Northern Line platforms, showing scenes from the funeral journey of Eleanor of Castile

Location
Place Charing Cross
Local authority
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Embankment

Location
Place Victoria Embankment
Local authority Westminster

Operations
Managed by London Underground
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Leicester Square

Location
Place Leicester Square
Local authority Westminster

Operations
Managed by
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art gallery or art museum is a space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art. Paintings are the most commonly displayed medium; however, sculpture, photographs, illustrations, installation art and objects from the applied arts may also be shown.
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Trafalgar Square is a square in London, the capital city of the United Kingdom, that commemorates the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), a British naval victory of the Napoleonic Wars.
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London
Canary Wharf is the centre of London's modern office towers
London shown within England
Coordinates:
Sovereign state United Kingdom
Constituent country England
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A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person.
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Motto
"Dieu et mon droit" [2]   (French)
"God and my right"
Anthem
"God Save the Queen" [3]
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photograph (often shortened to photo) is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip.
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caricature is either a portrait that exaggerates or distorts the essence of a person or thing to create an easily identifiable visual likeness, or in literature, a description of a person using exaggeration of some characteristics and oversimplification of others.
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Painting, meant literally, is the practice of applying color to a surface (support) such as paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer or concrete. However, when used in an artistic sense, the term "painting" means the use of this activity in combination with drawing, composition and
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The external links in this article or section may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies.
Please [ improve this article] by removing excessive or inappropriate external links. Please remove this tag when this is done.
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sculpture is a man-made three-dimensional object intended for special recognition as art. A person that creates sculptures is called a sculptor.

Materials of sculpture through history


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William Hogarth (November 10, 1697 – October 26,1764) was a major English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, and editorial cartoonist who has been credited as a pioneer in western sequential art.
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Sir Joshua Reynolds RA FRS FRSA (16 July 1723 – 23 February 1792) was the most important and influential of 18th century English painters, specializing in portraits and promoting the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealization of the imperfect.
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Somerset House is a large building situated on the south side of the Strand in central London, overlooking the River Thames, just east of Waterloo Bridge. The central block of the Neoclassical building, the outstanding project of the architect Sir William Chambers, dates from
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Views
Graphical projections
  • Perspective projection
  • Parallel projection
  • Orthographic projection
  • Plan, or floor plan view
  • Section

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Edward VI
Edward VI

Reign 28 January 1547–6 July 1553
Born 12 September 1537(1537--)
Hampton Court Palace
Died 6 July 1553 (aged 17)
Greenwich Palace

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Patrick Branwell Brontë (IPA: [ˈbɹɒntɪ]; 26 June 1817 – 24 September 1848) was a painter and poet, the only son of the Brontë family, and the brother of the writers Charlotte, Emily and Anne.
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Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë by George Richmond, 1850
Pseudonym: Currer Bell
Born: March 21 1816(1816--)
Thornton, Yorkshire, England
Died: March 31 1855 (aged 40)
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Emily Jane Brontë

Portrait by her brother
Born: July 30 1818(1818--)
Thornton, Yorkshire, England
Died: November 19 1848 (aged 30)
Haworth, Yorkshire, England
Occupation: Novelist, Poet
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Anne Brontë

Anne Brontë, by Charlotte Brontë, 1834
Born: January 17 1820(1820--)
Thornton, Yorkshire, England
Died: May 28 1849 (aged 29)
Scarborough, England
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Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria; 24 May 1819 – 22 January 1901) was the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837, and the first Empress of India from 1 May 1876, until her death on 22 January 1901.
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Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (Francis Augustus Charles Albert Emanuel, later HRH The Prince Consort of the United Kingdom) (26 August 1819 – 14 December 1861) was the husband and consort of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
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The National Gallery

Established 1824
Location Trafalgar Square, London WC2, England, United Kingdom
Collection size 2,300 paintings
Museum area 46,396 m²[1]
Visitor figures 4,600,000 (2006)[2]
Director Martin Wyld (acting)
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Ewan Christian (September 20, 1814 – February 21, 1895) was a British architect.

Christian was born on the Isle of Man. He is most notable for the restoration of Carlisle Cathedral, the alterations to Christ Church Spitalfields in 1866, and the extension to the
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