I’m pleased to see that Canada is resurrecting the idea of establishing a National Portrait Gallery which, I think, got further than is implied in the attached article (if you can open it). There was a Director, Lilly Koltun, who pursued the project with admirable energy (she died last year) and a building project, designed by Edward Jones.
The obvious precedent ought probably to be not so much the National Portrait Gallery in London, with over 150 years behind it, or Washington, a product of the 1960s, but Canberra, which emerged in the 1990s as a combination of private initiative – established through effective campaigning by Gordon and Marilyn Darling – and state funding: it has been very successful in combining photography and portraiture, starting with a broad remit and an adventurous exhibition programme. The risk is that the older established portrait galleries look too traditionalist, although both have radically reinvented themselves.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
The late Lilly Koultern ,as director of the PGC was a tireless advocate for the Portrait Gallery of Canada, to be constructed