National Portrait Gallery

I went to the National Portrait Gallery today, not to be confused with the National Gallery. The NPG is specifically meant for portraits of royals, notable folk, and features the human face in all its forms. It is another free museum of good quality that makes a good 3-4 hours pass satisfyingly.

The entrance isn’t as grand as The National Gallery or British Museum, but the display rooms make up for it in an efficient and comfortable manner. Most rooms have simple open ceilings and plain walls to let the pieces speak for themselves. Many have color schemes and specific lighting to highlight certain kinds of paintings, eras, or preserve the paintings from harsh light. The first level had the recent results of a nation-wide photography contest. As a display said, nothing like a contest brings out the best in people. Black and white, stylistic, narratives, and gritty photographs were everywhere.

In one area, there was a room from a specific artist who did disturbingly chaotic pictures of some famous chap named George Melly, a performer and writer. The room had a collection of 6 or 7 scribbley pictures of this guy that turned out to look like the Joker with a hat. I was also drawn to another room with a red sculpture of a man’s head. It was encased in a glass thingamabobber and was unmarked. A thermometer displayed the temperature inside. I searched the room and found the description that told me it was Marc Quinn’s sculpture entitled “Self”. The red color of the head came from several pints of the artist’s blood that he poured into a plastic mold of his head. It was then frozen, so needs to be in a specific environment to keep it’s shape. I didn’t quite buy the explanation, which included the old cliché “fragility of life” for the meaning of the piece, and seemed to me to be self-indulgent while utilizing shock value. While looking through the most contemporary sections of the gallery, I was very amused to see a guy looking at the paintings with the classic little French artist hat and glasses.

The museum really was arranged well. A long, thin escalator took visitors up to the level with historic paintings of Kings and nobles through the ages. I didn’t expect to get such a history lesson out of this trip, but each numbered room went up in numerical and chronological order, featuring works of kings, lords, ladies and more. After a while the painted posed pictures pretty much blur together and look the same. There was a period when all the subjects grew fat. They eventually straightened themselves out, but the picture size seemed to increase dramatically for lords and ladies alike.

The NPG is a must for any history buff. Actually, it is a must for anyone who wants an illustrated picture book of England’s history for free.