The National Portrait Gallery.\u00a0 Who\u2019s in it?\u00a0 Who\u2019s not?\u00a0 Not to beat a dead horse about the \u201celitism\u201d that other people have mentioned, but much of what has been said is factually true.\u00a0 Most of the portraits are of rich white men and women: royalty, statesmen, authors, artists etc.\u00a0 The cultures of the melting pot that London is today are conspicuously missing.\u00a0 However, I am not sure that \u201celitist\u201d is the right word to describe the museum.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think the museum itself is \u201celitist.\u201d<\/p>\n
First, the National Portrait Gallery is primarily an art museum, and secondarily a history museum.\u00a0 Much of the text on the signs focused on the artist, the painting techniques, and the treatment of the painting to preserve it.\u00a0 This type of text was accompanied by a short biography of the subject of the painting.\u00a0 The museum is not necessarily obligated to present a comprehensive picture of the history of immigration or the changing makeup of London neighborhoods and the other topics we have focused on so far.\u00a0 I think it falls into an entirely different category from other museums such as the Museum of London and the British Museum.\u00a0 Even so, I would argue that the NPG does teach us something about British culture and history precisely because of the lack of portraits of non-white lower class people.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We need to remember that lower class British citizens could not afford to have portraits painted of themselves.\u00a0 Secondly, British citizen regarded their slaves as objects, not people, and regarded the people of the countries they imperialized as distinctly inferior to them.\u00a0 It would have occurred to no one to depict these people in a portrait, and the people with the money would not have paid for it.\u00a0 Historians and artists throughout history have only become interested in and recognized the importance these communities only in hindsight.\u00a0 It is the same story in the US concerning our own slaves and Native Americans.\u00a0 The National Portrait Gallery shows us this, and is a sort of indirectly and unfortunately accurate depiction of British history and the history of immigrant populations.<\/p>\n
It is true that unlike the Docklands Museum and the Museum of London, the National Portrait Gallery is not apologetic about the absence of minorities.\u00a0 I say \u201cabsence\u201d here and not \u201comission\u201d or a synonym because the lack of diversity in the portraits is more due to a lack of resources than elitism \u2013 a word that I feel implies purposefulness.\u00a0 However, the Docklands Museum and the Museum of London are more diverse museums in general, with pieces like pottery, tools, furniture, clothing, human remains etc\u2026 to tell their story, while the NPG\u2019s goal is to portray history and culture specifically through portraiture.<\/p>\n
All this being said now, I was most interested in how the NPG demonstrates how painting techniques have changed and developed throughout history and I feel like I learned a lot about this topic I previously knew little about.\u00a0 As I looked through the Tudor portraits, I began to feel like the faces were rather interchangeable.\u00a0 The women\u2019s faces were not particularly feminine and the men\u2019s faces were not particularly masculine.\u00a0 There was little variation in face shape and feature shape, and it seems as though what distinguished one portrait from another was the clothing or the hair.\u00a0 It was as if there was a generic face template that every Tudor artist knew.\u00a0 When I got to the set of portraits of Elizabeth I, I found that I was right.\u00a0 There were certain portrait \u201cformulas\u201d that allowed artists to copy portraits and to create portraits without the live model.\u00a0 As I moved through the galleries to the Victorian Age and beyond, I began to notice more individuality in the faces, and if there were two portraits and a bust of a certain subject, all three indeed looked like the same person.\u00a0 I found I was able to recognize certain figures I knew without looking at the signage, including Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.\u00a0 (Ok so I mixed up Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, but to be fair, they are sisters, and look rather alike.)<\/p>\n
I think a particularly interesting painting in the NPG was a portrait of Elizabeth I.\u00a0 An X-ray of this painting showed that it had been painted on a reused canvas; painted over an unfinished portrait of an unknown woman.\u00a0 The unknown woman is facing in the opposite direction from Elizabeth and is painted on a completely different position on the canvas.\u00a0 I think what drew me to this painting was the mysterious aspect of it \u2013 almost a second painting that was hidden until revealed by modern technology.<\/p>\n
Although I was sort of weirded out by some of the more modern portraits (particularly the silicone and glass skull filled with the artists own blood) I enjoyed my visit today, and feel as though it was both useful and informative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The National Portrait Gallery.\u00a0 Who\u2019s in it?\u00a0 Who\u2019s not?\u00a0 Not to beat a dead horse about the \u201celitism\u201d that other people have mentioned, but much of what has been said is factually true.\u00a0 Most of the portraits are of rich white men and women: royalty, statesmen, authors, artists etc.\u00a0 The cultures of the melting pot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":444,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6679],"tags":[991],"class_list":["post-2951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2010-kaitlin","tag-national-portrait-gallery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/444"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2951\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}