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Icons and imagery

Alison Weir explores the National Portrait Gallery, London and the BP Portrait Award to find what makes a good painted portrait - past and present.

Great Scots

Diana O’Neil samples the tartan treats on offer in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

The importance of being bearded

Joanna Gilmour discovers that the beards of the ill-fated explorers Burke and Wills were as epic as their expedition to traverse Australia from south to north.

The life of Bryant

Tenille Hands explores a portrait prize gifted to the National Screen and Sound Archive.

You beauty

Joanna Gilmour explores the fact and fictions surrounding the legendary life of Irish-born dancer Lola Montez.

Lovingly observed

Sarah Engledow previews the beguiling summer exhibition, Idle hours.

In a good paddock

Celebrating a new painted portrait of Joseph Banks, Sarah Engledow spins a yarn of the naturalist, the first kangaroo in France and Don, a Spanish ram.

Big bouquet of Blackmans

Dr. Sarah Engledow explores the context surrounding Charles Blackman's portrait of Judith Wright, Jack McKinney and their daughter Meredith.

Terms and conditions

The Dissecting Room

Joanna Gilmour accounts for Australia’s deliciously ghoulish nineteenth century criminal portraiture. 

Some prime ministers

Sarah Engledow explores the history of the prime ministers and artists featured in the exhibition.

The Rothschilds, the Montefiores, and the Victorian Gold Rush

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.

Anna Culliton

Anna Culliton never had a colouring-in book when she was little. Her parents –Tony, a filmmaker, and Stephanie, a painter – wouldn’t let her have one. Instead, they insisted on her drawing her own pictures to colour-in. 

The Thyssen Art Macabre

Books seldom make me angry but this one did. At first, I was powerfully struck by the uncanny parallels that existed between the Mellons of Pittsburgh and the Thyssens of the Ruhr through the same period, essentially the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Thrown together

Shipmates for years, James Cook and Joseph Banks each kept a journal but neither man shed light on their relationship.

Generous Janice

Dr Sarah Engledow puts four gifts to the National Portrait Gallery’s Collection in context.