© National Portrait Gallery 2025
King Edward Terrace, Parkes
Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia
Phone +61 2 6102 7000
ABN: 54 74 277 1196
On the passage and pace of time
About Face article
In shock it fluctuates and with age, accelerates. Remembering the First World War and the Easter Rising.
The outlaws coolly disported themselves
Ned Kelly & co at Euroa, 9 and 10 December 1878
About Face article
'Each man arrayed himself in a new rig from head to foot, and even such luxuries as soaps and perfumery were not despised'
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.
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.
A stitch in time: Participating in portraiture
About Face article
Author and embroidery enthusiast Emma Batchelor shares her experience of joining a sewing circle with Portrait23: Identity artist Deborah Kelly.
Seeing stars
Celebrating Science Week
About Face article
It has been suggested that Sir Thomas Brisbane’s interest in the New South Wales governorship was as attributable to his passion for astronomy as to the desirability of the position as a prestigious career move.
Facing the inferno
About Face article
Tara James speaks to Cam Neville about his portrait series, Firefighters.
The mystery of Enoch Arden
About Face article
Tennyson's Enoch Arden was inspired by a story that Thomas Woolner passed on to him – but whose story and of whom?
Facing the feeling
About Face article
Penelope Grist explores the interplay between medicine and portraiture in Vic McEwan’s Face to Face: The New Normal.
Portrait dendrochronology
About Face article
Angus's latest Trumbology is accompanied by the following caveat: 'This one is reeeeeeally geeky.'
Of plague and portraits
About Face article
Corinna Cullen on the symbolic power of pandemic-related imagery over the ages.
The stately lotus
About Face article
I spent much of my summer holiday at D’Omah, on the outskirts of Yogyakarta. Lotus and waterlilies sprout in extraordinary profusion in artful ponds amid palms and deep scarlet ginger flowers.
The Rothschilds, the Montefiores, and the Victorian Gold Rush
About Face article
Some years ago my colleague Andrea Wolk Rager and I spent several days in the darkened basement of a Rothschild Bank, inspecting every one of the nearly 700 autochromes created immediately before World War I by the youthful Lionel de Rothschild.
Giving a dam
True south #1
About Face article
Ensconced and meditative in crisp Tasmania, Joanna Gilmour pays tribute to passionate green advocate and photographer Olegas Truchanas.
Embrace your inner nerd
About Face article
The southern winter has arrived. For people in the northern hemisphere (the majority of humanity) the idea of snow and ice, freezing mist and fog in June, potentially continuing through to August and beyond, encapsulates the topsy-turvidom of our southern continent.
Maria Caroline Brownrigg
About Face article
At first glance, this small watercolour group portrait of her two sons and four daughters by Maria Caroline Brownrigg (d. 1880) may seem prosaic, even hesitant