© National Portrait Gallery 2025
King Edward Terrace, Parkes
Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia
Phone +61 2 6102 7000
ABN: 54 74 277 1196
William Bligh
About Face article
The life of William Bligh offers up a handful of the most remarkable episodes in the history of Britain’s eighteenth and early nineteenth-century maritime empire.
Lord Kitchener
Imperial strategist
About Face article
Once central to military strategy and venerated in patriotic households, Lord Kitchener is now largely forgotten.
Missing Persons
Thomas Woolner in Australia
About Face article
Desperately seeking Woolner medallions
200 Years of Portraiture
About Face article
To celebrate his family bicentenary, Malcolm Robertson looks at the portraiture legacy left by his ancestors.
Inditchenous beestes of New Olland
About Face article
A remarkable undated drawing by Edward Lear (1812–88) blends natural history and whimsy.
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.
Centenary of ANZAC
About Face article
Just now we pause to mark the centenary of ANZAC, the day when, together with British, other imperial and allied forces, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps landed at Gallipoli at the start of the ill-starred Dardanelles campaign.
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.
School portraits
About Face article
Inga Walton sheds light on a portraiture collection usually only seen by students and teachers at Melbourne University.
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?
A colourful story from Sideshow Alley
Infamy, the macabre & the portrait
About Face article
From infamous bushranger to oyster shop display, curator Jo Gilmour explores the life of George Melville.
Stubbs and the horse
About Face article
One of the chief aims of George Stubbs, 1724–1806, the late Judy Egerton’s great 1984–85 exhibition at the Tate Gallery was to provide an eloquent rebuttal to Josiah Wedgwood’s famous remark of 1780: “Noboby suspects Mr Stubs [sic] of painting anything but horses & lions, or dogs & tigers.”
A passion eating into your vitals
The ‘Mad Dentist of Wynyard Square’ in court, 18 December 1865
About Face article
The salacious and sordid details of Henry Kinder’s death transfixed Sydneysiders with a case combining murder with seduction, mesmerism, blackmail and poisoning.
Banksia and grevillea
About Face article
Portraits can render honour to remarkable men and women, but there are other ways.
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 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.