© National Portrait Gallery 2024
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Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia
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Tribute: Mary Isabel Murphy
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The Chairman, Board, Director and all the staff of the National Portrait Gallery mourn the loss of our Benefactor, Mary Isabel Murphy.
Gotta catch 'em all
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Angus Trumble grabs his life jacket and rides the Pokémon GO tsunami.
Robert Oatley AO
1928–2016
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The National Portrait Gallery mourns the loss of one our most generous benefactors, Robert Oatley AO.
Crème Valaze
From lanolin to Balenciaga
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Helena Rubinstein (1872‒1965) was the first self-made millionairess of modern times, and created the first publicly-listed global cosmetics corporation.
School portraits
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Inga Walton sheds light on a portraiture collection usually only seen by students and teachers at Melbourne University.
Waterloo and Mrs. Moore
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Beyond the centenary of the ANZAC landings at Gallipoli, a number of other notable anniversaries converge this year. Waterloo deserves a little focussed consideration, for in the decades following 1815 numerous Waterloo and Peninsular War veterans came to Australia.
Beyond the bow tie
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Nathan Faiman delves into the rich life story and legacy of Alan Goldberg.
The mystery of Enoch Arden
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Tennyson's Enoch Arden was inspired by a story that Thomas Woolner passed on to him – but whose story and of whom?
The selfie stick
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Last week ABC Television came to interview me about selfie sticks. The story was prompted by the announcement that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has lately prohibited the use of these inside their galleries. So far as I am aware we have not yet encountered the phenomenon, but no doubt we will before too long.
Audacity, audacity, audacity
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Angus delves into the biographies of two ambitious characters; Sir Stamford Raffles and Sir John Pope-Hennessy.
20/20 launch speech
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Dr Helen Nugent AO, Chairman, National Portrait Gallery at the opening of 20/20: Celebrating twenty years with twenty new portrait commissions.
The eye and the heart
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Nici Cumpston immerses herself in the collective vision of the National Photographic Portrait Prize 2020.
The Thyssen Art Macabre
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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.
Maria Caroline Brownrigg
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At first glance, this small watercolour group portrait of her two sons and four daughters by Maria Caroline Brownrigg (d. 1880) may seem prosaic, even hesitant
Christmas Island
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This is my last Trumbology before, in a little more than a week from now, I pass to my successor Karen Quinlan the precious baton of the Directorship of the National Portrait Gallery.
The Rothschilds, the Montefiores, and the Victorian Gold Rush
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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.