National Portrait Gallery

The National Portrait Gallery's strength is depth of a specific kind: not the finest paintings by the greatest painters, but the widest run of documented likenesses of the people who made British history, from a single Tudor panel to same-decade photographic prints of contemporary public figures, held to one continuous chronological standard across roughly 195,000 works. Its holdings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century photography, at an estimated 250,000 prints, make it one of the largest photographic archives of named sitters anywhere, and its habit of collecting multiple portraits of the same person across media, drawing, oil, print, photograph, lets a researcher trace how a single public figure's image changed across a lifetime in one place.

The National Portrait Gallery was founded in 1856 on an argument that had nothing to do with brushwork: Philip Stanhope, 5th Earl Stanhope, working with the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay and the writer Thomas Carlyle, persuaded Parliament that Britain should hold a national collection of portraits of people who had shaped its history, chosen for what the sitter did rather than for who painted them or how well. Queen Victoria approved the founding grant of 2,000 pounds. The distinction still governs acquisition today, and it is the reason a visitor finds School photographs, terracotta busts, cartoons and Karsh's wartime press prints hanging beside oil portraits by named masters with no separation by medium or prestige, only by date.

The Gallery moved through several temporary premises before settling into the purpose-built structure at St Martin's Place, on the corner of Trafalgar Square, which opened in 1896. The architect was Ewan Christian, later President of the Royal Institute of British Architects; the building is faced in Portland stone and was built by Shillitoe and Son. Eighteen sculptural roundels set into the exterior name eighteen men associated with British art and letters, among them Horace Walpole, Anthony van Dyck and Joshua Reynolds. For 127 years the building's only public statement about whose faces mattered was carved in stone on the outside before a visitor ever got through the door.

The Gallery closed to the public in spring 2020 for Inspiring People, the most extensive rebuilding project in its history, designed by Jamie Fobert Architects with the conservation architects Purcell. The scheme is reported at roughly 35.5 million pounds by contemporaneous trade coverage, funded chiefly by the Blavatnik Family Foundation, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Garfield Weston Foundation and the Ross Foundation, and it reopened to the public on 22 June 2023. The most visible change is a new entrance and forecourt on the building's north facade, cut through three former windows and named Ross Place after its principal donor; the old side-street entrance had for decades been the only way in.

Behind the new door, the entire Collection was rehung top to bottom in a single chronological sequence for the first time, and the East Wing of the 1896 building, out of public use for years as offices, reopened as the Weston Wing with new gallery, catering and retail space. A new Learning Centre replaced a single studio with three. On the doors themselves, Tracey Emin's 45 cast-bronze female faces, drawn in acrylic before being transcribed into the metal, were installed as an explicit counterweight to the building's all-male exterior roundels; Emin has said the faces represent no one sitter but every woman, of every age and background.

The hang runs top to bottom by date. Floor 3, in the Duveen and Ondaatje Wings, opens with the Tudors and runs through the Civil War, the Kit-cat Club portraits, colonial expansion and the Romantics, ending around 1850. Floor 2, the Blavatnik Wing built for Inspiring People, covers the Victorians to the mid-twentieth century in nine rooms, including a room built around the Lucian Freud Archive of the artist's own sketchbooks and childhood drawings. Floor 1, the reopened Weston Wing, holds the Contemporary Collection from 2000 to today across four rooms: a century of self-portraits, contemporary portrait drawing, and Life and Death: Masks, which sets historic life and death masks, including casts associated with figures such as William Blake, beside recent works by Gillian Wearing, Tracey Emin and Marc Quinn that use masks to interrogate identity and mortality. Floor 0 holds the entrance hall, a room of recent history-maker sitters such as the campaigner Doreen Lawrence, the footballer Lucy Bronze and the musician Stormzy, and the Gallery's principal temporary exhibition space.

The building rewards more than a walk-through. The Portrait Restaurant sits on the top floor with a panoramic outlook toward Trafalgar Square and the West End; Larry's bar and dining room occupies the Weston Wing basement; and a monogrammed mosaic floor, in the building's own decorative tradition, marks at least one of its public spaces.

The Gallery describes its holdings as around 195,000 works, and its own account of the 2023 redisplay puts the photography holdings alone at roughly 250,000 prints ranging from 1840 to the present, a scale that makes the Gallery as much a photographic archive as a picture gallery. That balance shows on the walls: the rehang increased the share of photographic portraits on display, and named sitters recur across mediums, so a visitor can trace Charles Darwin, for instance, through a pencil drawing, an oil portrait and several photographic prints without leaving the same collection.

Some of the Gallery's best-known individual works are not always on the wall in London. Cassandra Austen's sketch of her sister Jane, and Branwell Bronte's group portrait of his three novelist sisters, were both on loan and on display at the Shanghai Museum at the time of this research rather than at St Martin's Place, a detail worth checking before planning a visit specifically to see either one. The Gallery routinely lends internationally as part of the national programme it ran throughout the 2020-2023 closure, when hundreds of portraits toured partner museums, schools and communities across the country while the building itself was shut.

One of the new rooms created by Inspiring People, on Floor 3, is given over explicitly to Portraying Colonial Expansion and Experience, part of a wider curatorial decision, credited by the Gallery to chief curator Alison Smith, to keep contested and colonial-era sitters on display rather than remove them, while adding context about the wealth, trade and power that put them there. The Art Newspaper's contemporaneous reporting on the rehang recorded specific, cited increases in the proportion of women and ethnic-minority sitters shown in the post-1900 galleries, and noted the joint 25 million pound acquisition, with the J. Paul Getty Museum, of Joshua Reynolds' portrait of Mai (Omai), among the earliest British portraits of a named Pacific Islander. The Gallery's Windrush: Portraits of a Pioneering Generation display, marking the 75th anniversary of the Empire Windrush's arrival, sits in the same spirit: ten portraits of people who built new lives in Britain after 1948, shown as history makers in their own right rather than as an addendum to it.

The economics are unusual for a national collection of this profile: the permanent Collection is free every day, and the Gallery earns its exhibition revenue instead from ticketed blockbuster shows, of which Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait, running through the centenary of the star's birth into September 2026, was a recent example, priced from 25 pounds on weekdays to 30 pounds at weekends with an optional donation, against free entry for Members and a Pay What You Can slot released weekly for Monday mornings. That structure lets the Gallery say every visitor can see the permanent Collection regardless of means, while asking the exhibition audience to fund the programme.

The building's second life has not gone unquestioned. A 2023 access review by the Museums Association praised the new entrance and gallery spacing but documented real friction for wheelchair users: three lifts covering different, overlapping parts of the building rather than one lift reaching every floor, one lift too small for a wheelchair user travelling with a companion, and only five disabled sitters identified among roughly 1,100 portraits on display, none of them in the contemporary Weston Wing. Writing in the New Statesman, critic Michael Prodger welcomed the architecture and the broadened representation but pressed a harder point: that a collection built to honour fame rather than artistic merit will always contain few indisputably great portraits, whatever else the redisplay gets right. Both criticisms sit alongside the praise rather than against it, and the Gallery's own public statements do not dispute either.

Visitors and critics both single out the 2023 reopening: a free, chronologically arranged collection that a reader can walk from the Tudors to the present day in a single visit, entered through a more generous new entrance after decades of a cramped side door. Specialist reviewers are warmer about the building and the redisplay's inclusiveness than about the intrinsic quality of everything now on the walls, and an access-focused review found real gaps between the architecture's ambition and how it works for a visitor using a wheelchair.