Portraits and Biography


Packed two day conference at the National Portrait Gallery on the relationship between portraits and the lives of their artists organised by the Paul Mellon Centre.

This was an academic conference made up of a series of papers under broad subject headings as well as an excellent keynote paper by Ludmilla Jordanova on what portraits of a profession can tell us using the Royal College of Physician’s collection as an example. We also had a talk by the curator of the current exhibition at the gallery on Gainsborough’s family portraits.

Interesting topics which came up included whether anatomical pictures can be considered to be portraits, what an Elizabethan portrait of a family can tell us about the lady of the house and how this is supported by writings about her, Portraits Histoiries in 17th century France, images of Royal mistresses in England in the same period and Harriet Hosmer’s cast of the hands of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

These two days gave me lots of follow up and think about!

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