© National Portrait Gallery 2025
King Edward Terrace, Parkes
Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia
Phone +61 2 6102 7000
ABN: 54 74 277 1196
Magna Carta
About Face article
On this day eight hundred years ago at Runnymede near Windsor, King John signed Magna Carta.
Longest reign
About Face article
Queen Elizabeth II is now the longest-reigning British sovereign
Angkor Wat
About Face article
Nothing quite prepares the first-time visitor to Cambodia for the scale and grandeur of the monuments of the ancient Khmer civilisation of Angkor.
Happy New Year
About Face article
This year (in March) we will celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the formal establishment of the National Portrait Gallery. In the life of institutions, twenty years is not a long time.
The consolations of religion
A bushranger meets his maker, 6 January 1826
About Face article
James McCabe provides proof that hanging wasn’t necessarily a fate reserved for the perpetrators of murder and other deeds of darkest hue.
Waterloo and Mrs. Moore
About Face article
Beyond the centenary of the ANZAC landings at Gallipoli, a number of other notable anniversaries converge this year. Waterloo deserves a little focussed consideration, for in the decades following 1815 numerous Waterloo and Peninsular War veterans came to Australia.
Lord Kitchener
Imperial strategist
About Face article
Once central to military strategy and venerated in patriotic households, Lord Kitchener is now largely forgotten.
Not perspiring, but glowing.
The cultural history of radiance.
About Face article
Angus Trumble explores the creative manifestations of radiance.
Cocky McGrath
About Face article
The long life and few words of a vice-regal cockatoo
Very fine and very like
About Face article
When did notions of very fine and very like become separate qualities of a portrait? And what happens to 'very like' in the age of photographic portraiture?
The Bath Butterfly
About Face article
The caricaturist and engraver James Gillray's biting satires about Sir Joseph Banks.
Goods and chattels
About Face article
I have been reading systematically through the ads in the earliest issues of the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, such a rich vein of information about certain aspects of daily life in Regency Sydney.
The selfie stick
About Face article
Last week ABC Television came to interview me about selfie sticks. The story was prompted by the announcement that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has lately prohibited the use of these inside their galleries. So far as I am aware we have not yet encountered the phenomenon, but no doubt we will before too long.
Grateful admiration and brotherly love
About Face article
In the earliest stages of the Great War, the Royal Pavilion in Brighton was turned into a military hospital, and arrangements made there to accommodate the different dietary and other requirements of Hindu, Sikh and Muslim patients.
Indexing, the art of
About Face article
The first index I created was for my first book, and, to my astonishment, that was almost twenty-five years ago.
Talking heads
About Face article
In their own words lead researcher Louise Maher on the novel project that lets the Gallery’s portraits speak for themselves.