National Portrait Gallery

This display marks one hundred years since the introduction of conscription by Herbert Asquith's government, in March 1916. As huge losses on the Western Front left the British army in need of more men, the Military Service Act required all unmarried men between eighteen and forty-one to defend their country. Those who refused to fight were called conscientious objectors (COs). Objecting on moral or religious grounds led to non-combatant roles in civilian work of national importance: labouring on farms or in aid posts. Some volunteered to drive field ambulances, but failure to serve in any capacity meant imprisonment. COs were required to argue their case for exemption before tribunals, which were generally unsympathetic and resulted in very few men being given exemption. During the Great War some 16,000 men were officially recorded as COs in Britain. Deprived of their right to vote, they were often abused as cowards and traitors. Among their ranks were numerous artists, writers and political activists.

The display will draw particular attention to one of the photographic albums of the society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, a keen amateur photographer and patron of the arts. At the outbreak of the First World War, Ottoline and her husband the politician Phillip Morrell joined forces with leading political figures to establish the anti-war Union of Democratic Control. In the following years they made their Oxfordshire home, Garsington Manor, a refuge for COs among their circle, providing employment on the estate farm, while continuing to entertain a range of visitors representative of different perspectives on the war.

The poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) enlisted in the Sussex Yeomanry (1914) and was commissioned into the Royal Welsh Fusiliers the following year, winning a Military Cross in 1916. Whilst convalescing at Somerville College in Oxford, Sassoon visited Garsington for the first time and made contact with the group of pacifists led by Bertrand Russell. He returned to France in 1917 but was wounded and sent back to England where he wrote ‘Declaration Against The War’, a public protest about the horrors he had witnessed.

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• Family friendly

Website

http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/display/2016/conscientious-objectors-of-the-first-world-war.php

A focus on the illustrator and writer, Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898). In a short life of intense and fevered activity, Beardsley produced many original and highly-finished black-and-white drawings for process block reproduction.

His designs were frequently grotesque, morbid and erotic and include illustrations of Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock (1895) and Oscar Wilde's Salome (1894). He was also art editor for The Yellow Book (1894–5) and, with Arthur Symons, produced The Savoy (1896). Beardsley was known for his elegance, charm and witty conversation and became a cult figure of the decadent aesthetic movement.

He became embroiled in the scandal surrounding Oscar Wilde’s arrest for committing ‘indecent acts’ and in 1895 was sacked from the Yellow Book, after which he fled to France. Beardsley died of tuberculosis, which had plagued him since his youth, on 16 March 1898 aged only twenty-five.

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• Family friendly

Website

http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/display/2015/aubrey-beardsley-artist-and-aesthete.php

Clothing in Britain has often seen fantastical extravagance and distortion. This small display of paintings and miniatures explores the collars and ruffs that were such a striking feature of sixteenth and seventeenth-century dress. Their design and scale changed continually over the period, with each decade heralding a new fashion that allowed sitters to demonstrate their wealth and style. From the clean folds of starched linen to the intricate patterns of French and Italian lace, collars and ruffs offered men and women the perfect means with which to frame their faces for the world.

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• Family friendly

Website

http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/display/2016/framing-the-face-collars-and-ruffs.php

Defying easy categorisation, the photographer Lewis Morley (1925–2013) was by turns fashion photographer, portraitist, and documentarian. Although he spent most of his life overseas, growing up in Hong Kong to English and Chinese parents, and emigrating to Australia in 1971, he is perhaps best remembered for the portraits he made of ‘Swinging Sixties’ Londoners.

The National Portrait Gallery mounted a major retrospective of Morley’s work in 1989. In the years that followed, the artist gave the Gallery more than three hundred prints from his archive, most of around 14 x 11 in (356 x 279 mm) or smaller. Just prior to his death, Morley made a series of oversized photographs of some of his most famous works, with the express wish that they be shown at the Gallery. Four are appearing now, according to his wishes, for the first time.

Included in the display are sensational portraits of the brilliant, ill-fated playwright Joe Orton, and two portraits of model Christine Keeler, whose suggestive erotic pose straddling a wooden chair became one of the defining images of the 1960s.

Website

http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/display/2016/lewis-morley-mammoth-prints.php

To be photographed in the nineteenth-century usually meant visiting one of many competing commercial portrait studios. Since photographing outdoors was not practical for much of the period, photographers routinely equipped their studios with props, furniture, and backdrops to make their pictures look more natural and appealing. In doing so, they often recalled the conventions of traditional painted portraiture, contributing to early debates about photography’s status as ‘art’, while foregrounding its ability to represent truth or illusion.

While some photographers posed their sitters against plain backgrounds, seated in a chair or beside a small table, others chose specific items that could tailor compositions to reflect the identity of their sitters. Fashions changed, but many studio set-ups endured, reappearing throughout the nineteenth-century. The examples in this display show the inventiveness and skill demonstrated by some of the Victorian period's most sought-after photographers.

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• Family friendly

Website

http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/display/2016/setting-the-scene-staging-and-backdrops-in-studio-photographs.php

Black Chronicles showcases over forty photographs that present a unique snapshot of black lives and experiences in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. Developed in collaboration with Autograph ABP, this intervention in three gallery spaces includes some of the earliest photographs in the Gallery’s Collection alongside recently rediscovered photographs from the Hulton Archive, a division of Getty Images.

These portraits of individuals of African and Asian heritage bear witness to Britain’s imperial history of empire and expansion. They highlight an important and complex black presence in Britain before 1948, a watershed moment when the Empire Windrush brought the first large group of Caribbean immigrants to Britain. Research is ongoing and new information emerges continuously.

This display is part of Autograph ABP’s The Missing Chapter, an ongoing archive research programme supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Autograph ABP is a London-based arts charity that works internationally in photography and film, race, representation, cultural identity and human rights.

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• Family friendly

Website

http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/blackchronicles/display.php

William Eggleston is a pioneering American photographer renowned for his vivid, poetic and mysterious images. This exhibition of 100 works surveys Eggleston’s full career from the 1960s to the present day and is the most comprehensive display of his portrait photography ever.

Eggleston is celebrated for his experimental use of colour and his solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976 is considered a pivotal moment in the recognition of colour photography as a contemporary art form. Highlights of the exhibition will include monumental prints of two legendary photographs first seen forty years ago: the artist’s uncle Adyn Schuyler Senior with his assistant Jasper Staples in Cassidy Bayou, Mississippi, and Devoe Money in Jackson, Mississippi.

Also on display will be a selection of never-before seen vintage black and white prints from the 1960s. Featuring people in diners, petrol stations and markets in and around the artist’s home in Memphis, Tennessee, they help illustrate Eggleston’s unique view of the world.

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• Family friendly

Admission

Tickets with donation Full price £8 / Concessions £6.50
Tickets without donation Full price £7 / Concessions £5.50
Free for Members and Patrons

Website

http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/eggleston/exhibition.php

Picasso’s portraits epitomise the astonishing variety and innovation of his art. This major exhibition of over eighty works focuses on the artist’s portrayal of family, friends and lovers and reveals his creative processes as he moved freely between drawing from life, humorous caricature and expressive painting from memory.

On display will be portraits from all periods of Picasso’s career and in all media, from the realist paintings of his boyhood to his later ultra-spontaneous canvases. The works on show will range from celebrated masterpieces loaned by international institutions to works in private collections being shown in the United Kingdom for the first time.

Suitable for

• Family friendly

Admission

Tickets with donation Full price £19 / Concessions £17.50
Tickets without donation Full price £17 / Concessions £15.50
Free for Members and Patrons

Website

http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/picasso-portraits/exhibition.php