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Facing the inferno
About Face article
Tara James speaks to Cam Neville about his portrait series, Firefighters.
The Bath Butterfly
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The caricaturist and engraver James Gillray's biting satires about Sir Joseph Banks.
The consolations of religion
A bushranger meets his maker, 6 January 1826
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James McCabe provides proof that hanging wasn’t necessarily a fate reserved for the perpetrators of murder and other deeds of darkest hue.
Longest reign
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Queen Elizabeth II is now the longest-reigning British sovereign
Missing Persons
Thomas Woolner in Australia
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Desperately seeking Woolner medallions
Seeing stars
Celebrating Science Week
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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.
Robert Oatley AO
1928–2016
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The National Portrait Gallery mourns the loss of one our most generous benefactors, Robert Oatley AO.
An Australian in Paris
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This week it is impossible not to contemplate the ways in which France has touched many Australian lives.
Audacity, audacity, audacity
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Angus delves into the biographies of two ambitious characters; Sir Stamford Raffles and Sir John Pope-Hennessy.
Indexing, the art of
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The first index I created was for my first book, and, to my astonishment, that was almost twenty-five years ago.
The medallion
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In recent years I have become fascinated by the so-called Sydney Cove Medallion (1789), a work of art that bridges the 10,000-mile gap between the newly established penal settlement at Port Jackson and the beating heart of Enlightenment England.
200 Years of Portraiture
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To celebrate his family bicentenary, Malcolm Robertson looks at the portraiture legacy left by his ancestors.
William Bligh
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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.
An active and contemplative life
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From Cicero through St. Augustine and Coluccio Salutati right up to the present day, we have regularly weighed the significance, respective merits and competing priorities of the “active” versus the “contemplative” life. Can they coexist?
Diseased curiosity
Captain Moonlite et al on trial for murder
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Just after 10.00 o'clock on 3 December 1879, four prisoners were brought from their cells at Darlinghurst Gaol and placed in the dock of a courtroom heaving with agitated spectators
Very fine and very like
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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?