Everyday Icons: Collecting Popular Portraits


Quirky exhibition at National Portrait Gallery looking at popular portraits in society.

This is a new area of collecting for the gallery and it looked at how named individuals or identifiable characters are represented and seen by a wide cross section of people via the pictures of people that surround us that aren’t formal portraits. These range through caricatures, souvenirs, currency and posters. The show was arranged in sections including royalty, politics and Shakespeare as a national hero.

I loved the use of ceramics in it including a bust of William Booth, a commemorative plate for Victoria’s Golden Jubilee and a medieval floor tile of king. The more unusual items included the attached tea towel of Charles and Diana, a rubber duck of Shakespeare and a dog toy based on the Splitting Image puppet of Margaret Thatcher.

Closes 1 March 2020

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