National Portrait Gallery, London

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  On a February night in 1909, the National Portrait Gallery became the scene of a killing that had nothing to do with art. Inside a room known as the Arctic Room, John Tempest Dawson drew a revolver behind his wife's back. Dawson was 70. His wife, Nannie Caskie, was 58, and both were American nationals who had lived in Hove for around a decade. He shot her, then turned the gun on himself and died instantly; she died in hospital several hours later. An inquest heard that Dawson, a wealthy and well-travelled man, appeared to be suffering from a persecutory delusion. The killing stayed largely unknown until 2010, when the gallery put its own archive online. That archive included a personal account of the event written by James Donald Milner, then the gallery's Assistant Director. It is an unlikely footnote for a museum built to hold faces, not endings. The National Portrait Gallery exists to keep the likenesses of historically significant British people, chosen for who they were rather than who painted them. So how does an institution founded on a parliamentary vote and a modest government grant end up rebuilding itself again and again? And how does it end up, generations later, in a dispute over its own photographs online?

• 2. A Gallery Of Faces

  ›

  Visitors come face to face with the Chandos portrait, the most familiar image of William Shakespeare. No one can fully confirm that its sitter really is the playwright. Lord Ellesmere donated that very picture to the nation, making it the gallery's first acquisition.

  William Hogarth and Sir Joshua Reynolds both turned their brushes on themselves, leaving self-portraits inside the collection. A group portrait of the participants in the Somerset House Conference of 1604 counts as an important historical document in its own right. That holds true regardless of its artistic polish. William Scrots painted Edward VI using an anamorphic trick, distorting the king's face unless viewed from one precise angle. Patrick Branwell Brontë painted his own sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, long before their novels made the family famous. Elsewhere in the collection, a sculpture shows Queen Victoria and Prince Albert dressed in medieval costume. In pieces like these, curiosity value often outweighs artistic worth.

  Portraits of living people were barred from the collection until 1969. After that date, the gallery began admitting images of sitters who were still alive. Today it keeps a rotating selection of contemporary work alongside its historical galleries. It also stages exhibitions built around individual artists and hosts the annual BP Portrait Prize competition.

  None of these choices mattered yet in the gallery's earliest years, when it had no permanent walls of its own to hang anything on.

• 3. Building A Permanent Home

  ›

  Philip Stanhope, 5th Earl Stanhope, first proposed a National Portrait Gallery to Parliament in 1846, while serving as a Member of Parliament. His plan failed twice before he tried a third time, from the House of Lords, in 1856. That version passed, and with Queen Victoria's approval the House of Commons set aside £2,000 to establish the gallery. When it opened that year, it was arguably the first national public gallery anywhere built solely around portraits. Founder trustees included Stanhope, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Ellesmere. Busts of Stanhope, Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle still stand over the gallery's former main entrance on St Martin's Place. Carlyle himself became a trustee after Ellesmere's death in 1857.

  For its first 40 years, the gallery had no single permanent home. The first 13 years were spent at 29 Great George Street in Westminster. There the collection grew from 57 items to 208, and annual visitors rose from 5,300 to 34,500. In 1869 the collection moved to Exhibition Road, into buildings run by the Royal Horticultural Society. A fire there forced another move, to the Bethnal Green Museum in 1885. That site proved unsuitable too, troubled by its distance from the West End, condensation and poor waterproofing.

  William Henry Alexander, a philanthropist, then stepped in and donated £60,000, followed by a further £20,000. He also chose the architect, Ewan Christian, while the government supplied the St Martin's Place site plus another £16,000. Workers from Shillitoe & Son built the new galleries, faced in Portland stone. Both Christian and the gallery's first director, George Scharf, died shortly before the building was finished. The gallery opened at its new address on the 4th of April 1896, next to the National Gallery. A first extension followed in 1933, funded by Lord Duveen and designed by architect Sir Richard Allison. It rose on a site once occupied by St George's Barracks, running along Orange Street.

  During the Second World War, the collection was moved out of London entirely, to Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire. Pieces from the Royal Collection and paintings from Speaker's House in the Palace of Westminster were stored alongside it. Outside the 1896 buildings, stone busts of eminent portrait artists, writers and historians still look down on passers-by, sculpted by Frederick R. Thomas. Among them are Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Anthony van Dyck, Sir Peter Lely, Sir Godfrey Kneller and Sir Joshua Reynolds. The gallery also runs regional outposts at Beningbrough Hall in Yorkshire and Montacute House in Somerset. It has no connection to the separate Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, despite the overlapping name.

  Nearly seventy years passed before the gallery expanded its walls again. When it finally did, a very different kind of gift set the change in motion.

• 4. New Wings And Gifts

  ›

  Sir Christopher Ondaatje funded the gallery's second extension together with a £12 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. London-based architects Edward Jones and Jeremy Dixon designed the new wing, wedged into a narrow gap between two 19th-century buildings. The Ondaatje Wing opened in 2000, and its two-storey escalator carries visitors up toward the earliest part of the collection, the Tudor portraits.

  In January 2008, US billionaire Randy Lerner gave the gallery £5 million, its largest single donation to that date. Four years later, in January 2012, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, took on the National Portrait Gallery as one of her official patronages. Her own portrait was unveiled in January 2013. The gallery happens to hold nearly 20 portraits of Harriet Martineau and her brother James Martineau. Their great-nephew, Francis Martineau Lupton, was the Duchess's great-great-grandfather.

  Bodelwyddan Castle's long partnership with the gallery ended in 2017, after Denbighshire County Council cut its funding. That same June, the gallery was awarded £9.4 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The money went toward a transformation program called Inspiring People, its biggest development yet. By then the gallery had already raised more than £7 million toward a £35.5 million target. Building work was scheduled to begin in 2020. In October 2019, before that work began, semi-naked environmental campaigners staged a protest called Crude Truth in the Ondaatje Wing's main hall. Three activists doused in fake oil lay on a plastic sheet for about five minutes before standing, wiping themselves down and cleaning up. A clothed protester read a monologue urging arts organizations to sever ties with companies "funding extinction." The protest targeted BP's sponsorship of pieces in the gallery. Onlookers applauded, and the performance passed without interruption.

  The scheduled 2020 start date for that construction would arrive just as an entirely different crisis reshaped the gallery's plans.

• 5. The Inspiring People Rebuild

  ›

  Some of the gallery's rooms had closed by late May 2020, with the whole building shut by July, and the closure lasted until 2023. The York Art Gallery hosted one of the touring exhibitions in 2021. The Holburne Museum in Bath displayed Tudor portraits from the collection in 2022. Further exhibitions traveled to museums in Liverpool, Newcastle, Coventry and Edinburgh, later touring on to other venues. Partners included the National Trust, the National Maritime Museum and the National Gallery. A program called Coming Home loaned individual portraits back to the towns where their sitters had lived. Other exhibitions crossed the ocean to Japan, Australia and the United States. In London itself, the shops and restaurants closed, but the Heinz Archive and Library stayed open throughout.

  The project itself carried a name, Inspiring People, and the gallery summed up its ambition in one official description. It called the plan "a comprehensive redisplay of the Collection from the Tudors to now, combined with a complete refurbishment of the building, the creation of new public spaces, a more welcoming visitor entrance and public forecourt, and a new state of the art Learning Centre." The East Wing reopened as gallery space, gaining its own new entrance from the street. The refurbishment cost £41 million in total, designed by architect Jamie Fobert and the firm Purcell, with Gilbert-Ash as main contractor. It added new galleries, learning spaces, restaurants and a public forecourt. The gallery's main entrance moved, and now features three bronze doors, each 4 meters tall, carrying 45 portraits of un-named women drawn by Tracey Emin.

  In 2022, the Blavatnik Family Foundation gave the gallery £10 million. The foundation was established by U.S.-U.K. entrepreneur Sir Leonard Blavatnik. The gallery called the gift the most significant in its history. It funded the new Blavatnik Wing on the first floor, home to nine galleries covering more than a century of British portraits. The Princess of Wales reopened the gallery on the 20th of June 2023. There she met Sir Paul McCartney, whose photography exhibition became the first major show in the new space. She also viewed the newly acquired Portrait of Omai by Sir Joshua Reynolds, bought jointly with the Getty Museum in Los Angeles for £50 million. The gallery reopened to the public two days later, on the 22nd of June. In 2024 the whole Inspiring People project was shortlisted for the RIBA Stirling Prize.

  That transformation was steered by a small leadership team and a public budget that most visitors never think about.

• 6. Budgets, Staff And Directors

  ›

  In the 2007 to 2008 financial year, the National Portrait Gallery's total income reached £16,610,000. Most of it came from two sources: a government grant-in-aid of £7,038,000 and donations totaling £4,117,000. By the 31st of March 2008, the gallery's net assets stood at £69,251,000, and that same year it employed 218 full-time equivalent staff. As an executive non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, it also holds exempt charity status under English law.

  Sir George Scharf served as the gallery's first director, from 1857 until 1895. Sir Lionel Cust followed, from 1895 to 1909. He had previously worked at the British Museum's Department of Prints and Drawings. From 1901 to 1927 he also served as Surveyor of the King's Pictures. Charles Holmes led the gallery from 1909 to 1916 before becoming director of the National Gallery. James Milner directed from 1917 to 1927, followed by Henry Hake until 1951 and Charles Kingsley Adams until 1964. David Piper directed the gallery from 1964 to 1967, later leading the Fitzwilliam Museum and becoming the first director of the Ashmolean Museum in 1973. Roy Strong followed from 1967 to 1973, then John Hayes until 1994 and Charles Saumarez Smith until 2002. Sandy Nairne directed the gallery from 2002 to 2015, followed by Nicholas Cullinan until June 2024. Michael Elliott served as interim director in 2024 before Victoria Siddall took over as the current director.

  Protecting those assets, the gallery would discover, extended well beyond its own walls, and into a dispute over digital copies of its paintings.

• 7. A Fight Over Digital Images

  ›

  On the 14th of July 2009, the National Portrait Gallery sent a demand letter to a former editor of Wikipedia, alleging a breach of copyright. That volunteer had downloaded thousands of high-resolution reproductions of public domain paintings from the gallery's own website. They then placed the images on Wikipedia's sister media repository site, Wikimedia Commons. The gallery argued it held copyright over the digital images themselves, citing its significant financial investment in creating them. Single low-resolution images were already available on its own website. According to the gallery, the volunteer had "found a way to get around their software and download high-resolution images without permission."

  In 2012, the gallery changed course and licensed 53,000 low-resolution images under a Creative Commons licence, free for non-commercial use. A further 87,000 high-resolution images became available for academic use under the gallery's own licence, which invites donations in return. Before that, the gallery had charged for access to high-resolution images.

  By the most recent count on record, around 100,000 images had been digitised, roughly a third of the gallery's entire collection. The remaining two-thirds were still waiting their turn.