National Portrait Gallery - London, UK

17th January 2014 - Free

Joena Lisa, Joena Lisa 
men have named you

Britain, ey? What are we like? Well, we’re a bit like France, a lot like America, some like Germany with a little bit of Irish thrown in. In fact, name a country, we’re more like them than not. Some would say Britain's the last bastion of chivalry, galloping through the ages like Boudicca in her chariot - the most over-achieving land on God’s green. Others say we’re the result of geographic fortune in our isolation that meant a strong navy and lucky winds stopped many invasions and said ships could double up as hulking great slaving vessels, bursting with their quarry. The folks at the National Portrait Gallery have committed to showing us the faces of those who've built this ragtag, past-tense, tin-island empire that sixty million of us call home.

For reasons way too boring to bother you with now, I was up at the crack of dawn on the day of my visit and was, subsequently, the first person through the gates. I could have run to the centre of the gallery and shouted “first!” like those absolute FANNIES do on the internet, but I really didn't want to. 

She only had sex with her country. 
Or something.

An escalator takes you to the top floor (and the chronological start of the collection), passing the 20th century gallery on your journey without so much as a spoiler alert. Aside from casts of five or so Plantagenet kings, we kick off with the Tudors, because that’s when British history started, apparently. Everyone likes the Tudors, the stories are a bit fun and a bit bloody and a bit absolutely mental and this gallery has all the hits. Henry VIII, yep; Cardinal Wolsey, yep; Elizabeth I, yep (tons). The room’s darker than the rest, the lack of natural light and black wallpaper makes it feel like you’re in the Tower, awaiting your fate. The main Tudor space is like a big feast of Elizabethan luminaries: John Donne, Francis Drake, Philip Sydney and Mary Neville the Lady Dacre and her son Godfrey Fiennes, 10th Baron Dacre… yeah, I don't know either.

We (the royal "we", naturally) then arrived at the Stuarts, a much underrated dynasty in my book. And ‘my book’ is a phrase that kept springing to mind as I recognised so many paintings from my middle school history books, although these monarchs didn’t have glasses, Hitler moustaches or saggy witch boobs etched in biro.

Can you Handel it?
I'm bringing sexy Bach

It was beneath the portrait of Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne (your guess is as good as mine) that it occurred to me that the National Portrait Gallery straddles the gap between museum and gallery, and not altogether successfully. I wasn't judging the quality and artistic expression of the work, nor was I learning something about the people I didn't know or more about the people I did. I kind of just looked at a painting, maybe recognised the sitter. Then moved on.

Saying that, some of the spaces are staggering. The corridors and grand halls are designed with an exquisite eye, making it seem like a gateway to some British heaven, lined with dead courtiers and boring novelists (I’m looking at you Walter Scott). Gleaning so many rich, white people through the ages became tiresome and the portrait and story of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo (a freed slave) was refreshing. Does the museum represent true British history, or is it simply subject to its collection? I'd like to think the latter, but it's a pressing issue. There's plenty of space for the glories of British history, but where are the dedications to the horrors of its past?

Ben Jonson, as played by
Tom Baker

A high-functioning bald man

This changed when we got to Shakespeare, perhaps the first person in the collection to really mean something to me. I stood before the intimate yet gloomy canvas for a good ten minutes before a profound cliche came to me like the word of God - The National Portrait Gallery is what you make it. There are rooms dedicated to the mundane and the fusty, but you can dance past them with gay abandon, go on do it, because right next door you can get your fill of writers, scientists and syphilitic kings. 

Byron
"A heart whose love is innocent"
... yeah, right

With this in mind, I flew through the space about Imperialism and bounced right into the melodramatic throng of the romantics. Byron, the Shelley’s, Keats, Woolstonecraft: they’re all there, looking good. Well, as good as TB-ridden milksops can. Wordsworth’s there too, but who cares? Am I right?! My experience was a little sullied by a guide infroming his crowd, “Byron was somewhat overlooked in his time.” You mean the most celebrated figure of his age? “His work is a little lighthearted.” Read Darkness and get back to me, mate. 

I could do his job. Better. Loads better.

A gorgeous room for political reform is next door with a half-finished Wilberforce and other progressives gracing the walls and, you know what, I was starting to enjoy myself.

A pack of ten year-olds in hi-vis vests were being shown round for a school trip. Their teacher bellowed down the halls for all of British history to hear, “No, Solomon, you can’t just say ‘he looks like a girl’ because that doesn’t make you think.” Between pissing myself laughing and admiring the teacher's style, I turned to see just how spot-on little Solomon was:

Makes you think

Mary Seacole>Florence Nightingale
I.D.S.T.

Heading downstairs, the paintings generally maintained their conservative mantle, but among the moustachioed generals and dog-collared dullards there’s space for Darwin, the Brontes, Mary Seacole and the worst painter of his or any age: Edwin Henry Landseer. Things really start to pick up as we head towards the most brilliant and horrible century in human history: the 20th one. The paintings become less about the formal measures of a court painter acquiescing to the solipsistic whims of posh people, and more about an artist capturing the essence of their sitter. As the gallery is hung more or less chronologically, this begins around the Franco-Prussian war.

There’re nice touches like having Atlee and Churchill side by side, and a wall of Nazi toadies (Mosely, Chamberlain and Wallace fucking Simpson). There’s little James Joyce looking a lot like Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards, Dylan Thomas in a lovely jumper and the most bizarre exhibit in the entire gallery: French Master Chefs of the 1930s. I nearly shrugged my shoulders off. 

The previously mentioned 20th century gallery had a portrait of Paul McCartney, brilliantly named Mike's Brother (that's Mike McGear... of the Scaffold. The Scaffold.) Pick your poison with the rest: Blair, Thatcher, some royals and the worst painting in this or any gallery: HRH The Duchess of Cambridge (see bile below).

Portraits of Note

Emmeline Pankhurst -
"Although we adore men individually,
we agree that as a group they're
rather stupid." - M. Poppins

Winehouse -
The tabloids love her now

Charles II - My kind of king

Mick Jagger... I mean,
Alfred Lord Tennyson

Lady Colin Campbell.
I've never fancied anyone called
Colin before

It's David Bowie as the
Elephant Man. Kind of.

Lowry, by the man himself... amazingly.
I'd've guessed his self-portrait
to look more like this:

Portraits of Shit

What. The. Fuck. Is. This?
Is this how you lot see her?
It’s so sugary that if they wanted
to make it a commemorative
plate, the Daily Express would
smash it to bits for being too 
schmaltzy. 
All jokes aside, this might be
the worst painting I've seen.
Let me know what you think.

Overview

In truth, the National Portrait Gallery is a reliquary of your national heroes. It’s just, due to the chaotic and subjective nature of the human condition, “your” national hero could be Rudyard Kipling or Oliver Cromwell or Mary Neville the Lady Dacre and her son Godfrey Fiennes, 10th Baron Dacre or all three. Unlike me, you may have no interest in Handel at all, but may love John Rushworth Jellicoe, 1st Earl Jellicoe and fair play to you if you do because here he is:

Here. This is John Rushworth Jellicoe,
1st Earl Jellicoe

I found the National Portrait Gallery a fairly sensorial experience, like McDonald's or American Hustle. If you want artistic transcendence, the National Gallery’s right next door. If it's a detailed study of British/world history you're after, try the British Museum or the Museum of London. However, if you’re looking for a glorious cavalcade (or rogue’s gallery) of Great Britons, this is for you and, you know what, I lost three and a half hours there. It’s easy to knock human history from the ivory tower of the 21st Century, with our alienating gadgetry and knackered environment but the past happened, like it or not. The National Portrait Gallery does a grand job of presenting that history, warts and all. Much like British history itself, the National Portrait Gallery is bedecked in villainy, heroism and vast kingdoms of apathy upon which the sun never sets. 

A fun bunch