Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
INFORMATION
Arrival
There are two entrances to the NPG: disabled
access is from Orange St, while the main entrance is on St
Martin's Place. Once inside, head straight for the Ondaatje
Wing, where there's an information desk - you can pick up
an audioguide (£3.50) which gives useful biographical
1
background on many of the pictures.
Eating
There's a little café in the basement, and the
excellent but pricey rooftop
Portrait
restaurant on
Floor 3, with incredible views over Trafalgar Square
(
T
020 7312 2490).
The Tudors and Stuarts
To follow the collection chronologically, take the escalator to the trio of
Tudor Galleries
,
on Floor 2. Here, you'll find Tudor portraits of pre-Tudor kings as well as Tudor
personalities: a stout
Cardinal Wolsey
looking like the butcher's son he was and the
future
Bloody Mary
looking positively benign in a portrait celebrating her reinstatement
to the line of succession in 1544. Pride of place goes to Holbein's larger-than-life
cartoon of
Henry VIII
, showing the king as a macho buck against a modish Renaissance
background, with his sickly son and heir,
Edward VI
, striking a deliberately similar pose
close by. The most eye-catching canvas is the anamorphic portrait of Edward, an
illusionistic painting that must be viewed from the side.
Also displayed here are several classic propaganda portraits of the formidable
Elizabeth I and her dandyish favourites. Further on hangs the only known painting of
Shakespeare
from life, a subdued image in which the Bard sports a gold-hoop earring;
appropriately enough, it was the first picture acquired by the gallery. To keep to the
chronology, you must turn left here into room 5, where the quality of portraiture goes
up a notch thanks to the appointment of Van Dyck as court painter. Among all the
dressed-to-kill Royalists in room 5,
Oliver Cromwell
looks dishevelled but masterful,
while an overdressed, haggard
Charles II
hangs in room 7
alongside
his long-suffering
Portuguese wife and several of his mistresses, including the orange-seller-turned-actress
Nell Gwynne
.
The eighteenth century
he
eighteenth century
begins in room 9, with members of the
Kit-Kat Club
, a group of
Whig patriots, painted by one of its members, Godfrey Kneller, a naturalized German
artist, whose self-portrait can be found in room 10. Next door, room 11 contains a
hotchpotch of visionaries including a tartan-free
Bonnie Prince Charlie
and his saviour,
the petite Flora MacDonald. In room 12 there are several fine self-portraits, including a
dashing one of the Scot Allan Ramsay. Room 14 is dominated by
The Death of
Pitt the
Elder
, who collapsed in the House of Lords having risen from his sickbed to try and
save the rebellious American colonies for Britain - despite the painting's title, he didn't
die for another month.
In room 17, you'll find a bold likeness of
Lord Nelson
, unusually out of uniform,
along with an idealized portrait of Nelson's mistress,
Lady Emma Hamilton
, painted by
the smitten George Romney. Also here is a portrait of
George IV
and the twice-
widowed Catholic woman, Maria Fitzherbert, whom he married without his father's
consent. His o
cial wife,
Queen Caroline
, is depicted at the adultery trial at which she
was acquitted, and again, with sleeves rolled up, ready for her sculpture lessons, in an
audacious portrait by Thomas Lawrence, who was called to testify on his conduct with
the queen during the painting of the portrait.
The Romantics dominate room 18, with the ailing
John Keats
painted posthumously
by Joseph Severn, in whose arms he died in Rome. Elsewhere, there's
Lord Byron
in
Albanian garb, an open-collared
Percy Bysshe
Shelley
, with his wife, Mary, nearby, and
her mother,
Mary Wollstonecraft
, opposite.
The Victorians
Down on the first floor,
the
Victorians
feature rather too many stuffy royals, dour men
of science and engineering, and stern statesmen such as those lining the corridor of