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The Bath Butterfly
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The caricaturist and engraver James Gillray's biting satires about Sir Joseph Banks.
Milestones
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This month I turn fifty, soI am just now looking rather more closely than usual at Fiona Foley, Steven Heathcote, Brenda Croft, Russell Crowe, Jeff Fenech, Akira Isogawa, Lee Kernaghan, My Le Thi, Shona Wilson and Mark Taylor AO, mindful that they too were 1964 arrivals.
Kate Beynon’s transcultural life and art
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Phoebe Lupton profiles artist Kate Beynon, whose contemplative self portrait features in Archie 100: A Century of the Archibald Prize.
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.
Roam alone
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Jon Muir, adventurer and Portrait Gallery Collection subject, really knows about isolation.
Storied portrait
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Emily Casey takes in Shirley Purdie’s remarkable self-portrait, Ngalim-Ngalimbooroo Ngagenybe.
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.
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?
Portrait dendrochronology
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Angus's latest Trumbology is accompanied by the following caveat: 'This one is reeeeeeally geeky.'
Of plague and portraits
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Corinna Cullen on the symbolic power of pandemic-related imagery over the ages.
Beyond the bow tie
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Nathan Faiman delves into the rich life story and legacy of Alan Goldberg.
The Viceroyalty of New Spain
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European painters always enjoyed a good deal of latitude in the representation of angels, those asexual, bodiless, celestial regiments of God, so long as they were young and beautiful.
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.
Poise and Carats
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I keep going back to Cartier: The Exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia next door, and, within the exhibition, to Princess Marie Louise’s diamond, pearl and sapphire Indian tiara (1923), surely one of the most superb head ornaments ever conceived.
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.