National Portrait Gallery

Trafalgar Square with the National Gallery on my right and St Stephens in the Fields behind me. 

Visiting the National Portrait Gallery

Emma Hamilton and Horatio Nelson

The Duchess of Cambridge better known as Kate

There is a large exhibit of paintings and photographs dating from 1960.  I didn't see any of them and so I expect I will be going to the museum again soon. 

Currently, the Gallery has a special exhibit of Cezanne portraits.  I am only familiar with his landscapes.  In particular, a bridge painted in shades of green and brown. 

Being the penny pincher that I am, I gasped when I saw that a ticket to visit the exhibit was 18 Pounds.  I am afraid I will have to check it out some other day.  

From the main ticket area of the museum, a very long escalator stretches up to the Victorian era art. 

Since I had arranged to meet Earl in only half an hour, I started looking around for all of the beautiful women on the wall.  There were companion pictures of Victoria and Albert.  Massive.  I wanted to take a picture of Victoria, but the lighting in the gallery made it impossible to take a flashless picture of her. 

I know nothing about Agnes Strickland but was struck with how lovely she is in her portrait.  With the brief knowledge that I now have of this extraordinary woman who had a very unusual father, I would love to see her volume on the queens of England.  However, I suspect that I would probably enjoy the abridged volume more than the original.

I recently went to see a new movie about P T Barnum called the Greatest Showman. Jenny Lind is one o the historical characters featured in the film.  I think she was known as the Swedish Nightingale. She certainly looks lovely and innocent in this portrait of her.  

As you can see from the plaque this is a copy of the clasped hands of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning.  The two poet lovers.

Much to my surprise I apparently did not feel moved to take a picture of either of the poets.  

Elizabeth Barrett Browning from the National Portrait Gallery 1806 -1861

This article acknowledges that the painting is in the National Portrait Gallery but says nothing about the painter,  Michele Gordigiani,  or the painting itself.  In the painting, she has a very wrinkled face.  Probably smoother than mine but I think I was so surprised that she was not a younger woman.  This portrait was painted of her when she was in her 50s. She "caught a chill and died" while still in her 50s.  

This surprising painting of her is in the Library of Congress.  It is listed as being in the public domain. It is described as being painted in her youth

Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

George Grantham Bain Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-ggbain03571)

These are interesting paintings of the Bronte sisters. The one of a woman alone is of Emily.  Both pictures are heavily cracked and look as if no one thought to preserve them until they were well-worn portraits.  

Emily Brontë

by Patrick Branwell Brontë
oil on canvas, arched top, circa 1833
21 1/2 in. x 13 3/4 in. (546 mm x 349 mm)
Purchased, 1914

Primary Collection 

This is the only surviving group portrait of the three famous novelist sisters - from left to right: Anne, Emily and Charlotte Brontë. The portrait was known from a description of it by the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell who saw it in 1853. It was thought to have been lost until it was discovered folded up on top of a cupboard by the second wife of Charlotte Brontë's husband, the Reverend A.B. Nicholls, in 1914. In the centre of the group a male figure, previously concealed by a painted pillar, can now be discerned; it is almost certainly a self-portrait of the artist, their brother Branwell Brontë.

The Brontë Sisters (Anne Brontë; Emily Brontë; Charlotte Brontë)

by Patrick Branwell Brontë
oil on canvas, circa 1834
35 1/2 in. x 29 3/8 in. (902 mm x 746 mm)
Purchased, 1914