© National Portrait Gallery 2025
King Edward Terrace, Parkes
Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia
Phone +61 2 6102 7000
ABN: 54 74 277 1196
The hand of Captain Cook
Google Arts and Culture
Learning resources
Take a close look at a portrait with a hidden message in its hands. For Year 7 – 9 students.
National Photographic Portrait Prize 2024
Learning resources
Let’s take a look at the National Photographic Portrait Prize for 2024!
An Arctic Time Signature
by Devika Bilimoira
General content
Finalist, MDPA 2015
The 'Multi Exposed Hand'
22 January 2005
General content
Photographer Jozef Vissel talks about his ‘Multi Exposed Hand’ portrait of Sydney Opera House architect Jørn Utzon.
Transience
More about In the flesh
These paintings by Juan Ford and sculptures by Sam Jinks evoke the impermanence of human life.
Kate Beynon
Artists and Collectives
Born in Hong Kong, Naarm/Melbourne-based artist Kate Beynon builds from the cultural legacy of her familial ancestry and experience to envision hybrid personas, identities, worlds and mythologies.
Angelica Mesiti
Artists and Collectives
Internationally renowned, Paris-based artist Angelica Mesiti creates video installations that are absorbing and profound experiences for audiences.
Davida Allen
Explore The Popular Pet Show
Going around a gallery with a child, we point to a painting of a dog and brightly ask ‘What’s that?’ If they don’t say ‘A dog’, we tell them that’s what it is. We don’t say it’s a shape inscribed by an artist that’s popularly understood to signify a dog. That’d only serve to foster a smarty-pants.
William Robinson
Explore The Popular Pet Show
Unique in the world, perhaps, is a bronze sculpture that fuses the age-old human portrait bronze tradition, and the later genre of the bronze pug figurine: that’d be William Robinson’s Self-portrait with pug.
Jaq Grantford
Vox pops
A self-portrait from a different time, feels like a different time, even though it's only a couple of years ago or one and a half years, if that, and it was my commentary on COVID and how I was feeling about it at the time.
National Portrait Gallery Director announced
20 December 2013
Archived media releases 2013
The National Portrait Gallery welcomes Angus Trumble
The Amazing Face: a 14-day Dive into Portraiture
Archived media releases 2020
The National Portrait Gallery is offering a free online class on the art of portraiture from April 28.
Visiting with a school group
Visual Stories
Access support for students.
Katherine Bennett
Finalist interviews
The lady in the centre of this photograph is my partner's Granny. So we are almost directly related, and here, as with all photographic work. I am in a state of exchange though I think only directly, with one of the women!
Atul Bhalla
by Khavita Singh
Artist essays
Atul Bhalla was born in 1964 in New Delhi. He frequently combines photography, installation, sculpture, video, painting and performance to question the human relationship with the natural and constructed environment.
Visiting at a quiet time
Visual Stories
Access support for visitors with sensory sensitivities or autism.