The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in London reopens on June 22 after a complete repositioning of famous faces on its walls. Redevelopment of the historic institution’s interiors, along with a total overhaul of its collection, ensures it is now “a gallery for everyone”, said NPG chief curator Alison Smith.
The NPG embarked on the £41.3m project, led by Jamie Fobert Architects, in June 2020 when the UK was in lockdown due to the Covid19 pandemic. When the building reopens three years later, it will feature a new north-facing entrance and a renewed collection comprising over 1,000 works.
The rehang will take visitors on “a walk through British history, culture and society, from the Plantagenets to the present day”, Smith said. The arts journalpromising more contemporary art, a wider range of media, and more diverse designs that better reflect today’s audiences.
A cutaway rendering of the building, which includes new display areas that were previously offices © Jamie Fobert Architects
Just as the gallery’s 1896 building was in “desperate need of renovation” after its last expansion in the Ondaatje wing in 2000, the collection looked “outdated” and called for an update “in terms of kind of role models we portrayed, styles of portraiture and the way we wrote interpretive texts,” Smith says. “We needed to make the experience more welcoming for our visitors.”
One of the first portraits visitors will encounter in the transformed NPG will be a large tapestry by Kenyan-British artist Michael Armitage paying homage to four garbage collectors the artist observed at work during the lockdown. of Armitage John Barry, O Kelly, Sonny and Richard Moore (2022) will hang in a new gallery on the ground floor called History Makers, dedicated to recent acquisitions and commissions, including portraits of rapper Stormzy, anti-racism activist Doreen Lawrence and footballer Lucy Bronze. The work also marks a milestone in the history of a gallery long associated with great paintings by great models, hinting at several new developments in the art on display from the world’s largest collection of portraits.
When we were created, it was the model that was more important than the artist. Now we changed that
Alison Smith, Chief Curator
The NPG got its start in less egalitarian times. Earl Stanhope’s 1856 motion in the House of Lords proposed the establishment of a British portrait gallery of “men honorablely distinguished in war, state art, art or science” which would “offer not only great pleasure, but much instruction to the industrious”. Classes”. The plan was approved by Queen Victoria. The first portrait acquired by the gallery was that of William Shakespeare.
“When we were established in 1856, we were really talking about eminent personalities. The idea of impactful people and fame has changed over time,” Smith says. “We also talk about people who are caught up in the story. There are many, many different ways in which people have contributed to the UK we know today.
Fix the imbalance
The shift from men of honor to people of impact will bring many more portraits of women into the galleries, correcting decades of “gender imbalance”. At least in post-1900 galleries, the proportion of works on display depicting women will rise to 48% (compared to 37% before closing). “Much of our collecting activity has been to develop our representation of seated women over time, not only modern and contemporary, but also in the historical collection,” Smith explains. “We also release works from the store that have not been shown before.”
Previously male-dominated fields, such as science and technology, will be transformed, for example, by the arrival of the “first computer programmer” Ada Lovelace (via a loan from the Government Art Collection) and electrical engineer Caroline Haslett, whose campaign for appliances has “revolutionized the women’s home”.
Other efforts have been made through Reframing Narratives, a partnership with the Chanel Culture Fund that aims to increase the visibility of women in the NPG and challenge gender stereotypes. A new 8-metre-long mural by Jann Haworth and Liberty Blake, commissioned through the Chanel fund, will feature 130 women, from former warrior queen Boudicca to Jane Austen and singer Amy Winehouse.
Another priority has been to increase the representation of assistants from ethnic minorities, which rose from 3% to 11% during the rehang. A triumphant addition to the historic third floor galleries will be Portrait of Mai (Omai) (circa 1776) by Joshua Reynolds, one of the earliest portraits of a colored person in British art. Having joined Captain Cook’s crew in Tahiti, Mai is the first Polynesian to travel to the UK and he becomes the toast of British high society. The NPG raised £25m to buy the £50m painting in conjunction with the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, making it the largest acquisition in the gallery’s history.
NPG Tories have had to get creative to bring in ‘overlooked histories and missing models’ as they confront centuries of racial inequality in the subjects deemed worthy of British portraiture. The revamped displays “try to give equal status to a work on paper as a great society portrait,” Smith says. The disappeared will also be present through contemporary art interventions, photographic enlargements and digital interpretation.
Visitors can see the earliest known image of a black Briton, Tudor court trumpeter John Blanke, on a display near paintings of his royal patrons, Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. Contemporary loans will reflect the importance of black figures in the abolition of slavery, such as Lubaina Himid’s depiction of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture from the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and Elizabeth Peyton’s portrait of the Afro activist American Frederick Douglass of the Gladstone Gallery. Omoba Aina, an enslaved West African Yoruba princess who became a ward of Queen Victoria as Sarah Forbes Bonetta, will appear in photographic portraits and a lightbox enlargement in the Empire and Resistance gallery.
Add historical context
At a time of growing awareness – and deep political division – about Britain’s imperial past, the exhibits will recognize people who were enslaved alongside colonialists and merchants who profited from slavery. The NPG’s Anti-Racism Pledge, released in August 2020, included a pledge to be “transparent about racism and exploitation associated with certain models and works”.
Revisionist approaches to colonial history have since become a lightning rod problem, with Britain’s Department of Culture advocating a ‘keep and explain’ policy for monuments and museum objects. Smith points out that the gallery is “not canceling or erasing” Empire recipients, but adds greater historical context to their portraits.
Moving away from the “potted biographies” approach of past exhibitions, the rehang will do more both to contextualize the models and to highlight the artists and “portraiture”. “When we were created, it was the model that was more important than the artist,” Smith explains. “But now we’ve changed that, we’re also a portrait gallery. When we order and acquire today, there may now be an equal emphasis on artist and model.
Contemporary portraiture will now have dedicated galleries in the restored East Wing (renamed the Weston Wing after a £6.5m donation from the Garfield Weston Foundation), which has been closed to the public and used as office space for 40 years. And interspersed with the previous timeline, themed rooms will be devoted to Tudor panel painting, miniatures and engraving from the 16th to 18th centuries and the “photographic revolution”. Curators draw on the NPG’s collection of more than 220,000 photographs, increasing photography from 4% to 29% of portraits in galleries.
Photography will remain a pillar of the program of temporary exhibitions. The double poster of the reopening shows returns to never-before-seen photographs by Paul McCartney which offer “a private glimpse into the universe of The Beatles in 1964, when they were launching in the United States” (until October 1), and at Yevonde, a color photography pioneer “who should be best known as one of Britain’s great photographers” (until October 15), Smith says. An exhibition next spring will pair Francesca Woodman with Julia Margaret Cameron to explore symbolism and storytelling in photographs taken a century apart.
Sculpture will also play a larger role in the future NPG, with exhibits such as that of Thomas J. Price Give a hand (2021), of a woman looking at her phone – an acknowledgment of the digital devices that have made portraiture an ubiquitous part of modern life.
“Everyone has a direct relationship to portraiture: we all take photos, we all take selfies, people have ancestor photos and paintings,” Smith explains. The NPG certainly hopes to reinforce this sense of belonging with the reopening. All the changes add up to a gallery that will “feel more alive” – and more like “a conversation between the visitor and the subjects depicted on the walls”.
