© National Portrait Gallery 2025
King Edward Terrace, Parkes
Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia
Phone +61 2 6102 7000
ABN: 54 74 277 1196
Cecil Beaton
Portraits
Previous exhibition, 2005
Accomplished illustrator, painter, writer and diarist, set designer and one of the most distinguished photographers of the twentieth century, Cecil Beaton is renowned for his portraits of well known faces from the worlds of fashion, literature, and film.
Indecent exposure
Annette Kellerman
Previous exhibition, 2011
'Diving Venus' and 'the perfect woman' are two of the numerous descriptions applied to Annette Kellerman, who achieved international fame during the early decades of the twentieth century.
Elegance in exile
Portrait drawings from colonial Australia
Previous exhibition, 2012
Elegance in exile is an exhibition surveying the work of Richard Read senior, Thomas Bock, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and Charles Rodius: four artists who, though exiled to Australia as convicts, created many of the most significant and elegant portraits of the colonial period.
POL
Portrait of a Generation
Previous exhibition, 2003
POL was a magazine that ran from 1969 to 1986
Sideshow Alley
Infamy, the macabre & the portrait
Previous exhibition, 2015
Death masks, post-mortem drawings and other spooky and disquieting portraits... Come and see how portraits of infamous Australians were used in the 19th century.
Primed
Some Prime Ministers
Previous exhibition, 2019
Seventeen of Australia’s thirty prime ministers to date are represented in the contrasting sizes, moods and mediums of these portraits.
To Look Within
Self Portraits in Australia
Previous exhibition, 2004
This exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of self-portraits in Australia, from the colonial period to the present