Highlights of the Reference Collection

Interesting online lecture from the National Portrait Gallery looking the gallery’s reference collection.

Paul Cox, Curator of the Reference Collection, explained how the collection sat within the library and archive department and was originally a collection of material to help curators research portraits and people but as it had a lot of prints of portraits it seems to have grown into the print and ephemera collection for the gallery.

Cox showed us some of the highlights of the collection including the sketchbooks of the first director of the gallery, Sir George Scharf, who went round all the country houses of England making annotated sketches of their portraits. We also looked at the collection over 80,000 prints collected by Henry Witt Martin and the volumes of John Smith’s mezzotints of portraits by Sir Geoffrey Kneller.

He also talked about new acquisitions broadening out the collection such as items on national stereotypes such as John Bull and examples of the sorts of portraits ordinary people would have collected such as commemorative ceramics.

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