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Dance like everyone’s watching
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Penelope Grist’s spirits soar with Lisa Tomasetti’s Dancers in the Streets series.
Dempsey's people
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Those of you who are active in social media circles may be aware that through the past week I have unleashed a blitz on Facebook and Instagram in connection with our new winter exhibition Dempsey’s People: A Folio of British Street Portraits, 1824−1844.
A bear of great substance
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Just in time for Christmas, Angus reflects on the most special present he has ever received.
A portrait of the artist by the artist
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Rowan McGinness asks: when is a self portrait not a self portrait?
Embrace your inner nerd
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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.
Home is where the art is
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Tedi Bills on how social media in the age of COVID-19 has fanned the flames of our portrait fascination.
Trumble's way
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At the end of a summer break one is tempted to say that there is nothing much to report. Isn’t one restful holiday very much like another?
20/20 launch speech
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Dr Helen Nugent AO, Chairman, National Portrait Gallery at the opening of 20/20: Celebrating twenty years with twenty new portrait commissions.
The Thyssen Art Macabre
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Books seldom make me angry but this one did. At first, I was powerfully struck by the uncanny parallels that existed between the Mellons of Pittsburgh and the Thyssens of the Ruhr through the same period, essentially the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Talking heads
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In their own words lead researcher Louise Maher on the novel project that lets the Gallery’s portraits speak for themselves.
Of plague and portraits
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Corinna Cullen on the symbolic power of pandemic-related imagery over the ages.
The play’s the thing
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Penelope Grist charts an immersive path through Stuart Spence’s photography.
The Rothschilds, the Montefiores, and the Victorian Gold Rush
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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.