© National Portrait Gallery 2024
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Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia
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A colourful story from Sideshow Alley
Infamy, the macabre & the portrait
About Face article
From infamous bushranger to oyster shop display, curator Jo Gilmour explores the life of George Melville.
Prime Ministers
About Face article
On the day before the Hon. E. G. Whitlam, AC, QC, died last month, at the great age of 98, there were seven former prime ministers of Australia still living, plus the incumbent Mr. Abbott – eight in all.
Longest reign
About Face article
Queen Elizabeth II is now the longest-reigning British sovereign
An affray which deserves particular mention
Ben Hall and his gang outdone, 6 February 1865
About Face article
Bushranger Ben Hall and his cronies held around 40 people hostage in a pub north-west of Goulburn, telling their captives ‘don’t be alarmed; we only came here for a bit of fun’.
Centenary of ANZAC
About Face article
Just now we pause to mark the centenary of ANZAC, the day when, together with British, other imperial and allied forces, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps landed at Gallipoli at the start of the ill-starred Dardanelles campaign.
Missing Persons
Thomas Woolner in Australia
About Face article
Desperately seeking Woolner medallions
Tribute: Mary Isabel Murphy
About Face article
The Chairman, Board, Director and all the staff of the National Portrait Gallery mourn the loss of our Benefactor, Mary Isabel Murphy.
Diseased curiosity
Captain Moonlite et al on trial for murder
About Face article
Just after 10.00 o'clock on 3 December 1879, four prisoners were brought from their cells at Darlinghurst Gaol and placed in the dock of a courtroom heaving with agitated spectators
The Bath Butterfly
About Face article
The caricaturist and engraver James Gillray's biting satires about Sir Joseph Banks.
The mystery of Enoch Arden
About Face article
Tennyson's Enoch Arden was inspired by a story that Thomas Woolner passed on to him – but whose story and of whom?
Cooey! An Australian Song
About Face article
"Coo-ey, Coo-ey, Coo-ey, Coo-ey—Love has caught the strain, Coo-ey, Coo-ey, Coo-ey, Coo-ey—it whispers back again." The “Australian lady” who composed these fruity lyrics was none other than Desda— Jane Davies, sometime Messiter (née Price) of Leddicott, Lavender Bay.
Stubbs and the horse
About Face article
One of the chief aims of George Stubbs, 1724–1806, the late Judy Egerton’s great 1984–85 exhibition at the Tate Gallery was to provide an eloquent rebuttal to Josiah Wedgwood’s famous remark of 1780: “Noboby suspects Mr Stubs [sic] of painting anything but horses & lions, or dogs & tigers.”
Very fine and very like
About Face article
When did notions of very fine and very like become separate qualities of a portrait? And what happens to 'very like' in the age of photographic portraiture?
Of plague and portraits
About Face article
Corinna Cullen on the symbolic power of pandemic-related imagery over the ages.
The Rothschilds, the Montefiores, and the Victorian Gold Rush
About Face article
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.
The personal and the historical
About Face article
Where do we draw a line between the personal and the historical? Although she died in Melbourne in 1975, when I was not quite eleven years old, I have the vividest memories of my maternal grandmother Helen Borthwick.