In reading the Companion to the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, I had a distant recollection that I had been asked to contribute a paper to a conference in Sydney not long after the foundation of the NPG in Canberra. I had some difficulty tracking it down because the filing system on my computer is far from infallible. But having done so, I am reproducing it because it provides a record of my views at the time of what portrait galleries could, and should, be and of the differences between the London and the Canberra versions:-

The Idea of a Portrait Gallery

In Britain, there is an inevitable tendency to think of the National Portrait Gallery as being associated with the formation of the mid-Victorian nation state and to be part of the growth of public institutions for historical record during the 1850s.[1]   It has therefore been interesting to watch from the other side of the world the formation of a National Portrait Gallery in the very different circumstances of Australia in the 1990s, part, perhaps, of a debate about the nature of Australia as a state, its special characteristics and its desire for some form of effective public historical record during a period of possible transition from constitutional dependence on the monarchy to a republic.   The formation of a National Portrait Gallery in Canberra prompts a set of reflections about the nature and status of the four National Portrait Galleries currently existing, in Canberra, in Washington, in Edinburgh and in London.   What are the different ways of establishing a National Portrait Gallery ?  What are the differences (however marginal) between the conception of the four existing National Portrait Galleries ?  What are the ideas which lie behind their current mode of operation ?

*****

The volition behind the establishment of a National Portrait Gallery in Canberra lay, to a large extent, with Gordon and Marilyn Darling.[2]   In the basement of the National Portrait Gallery in London is a file waiting to be catalogued marked National Portrait Gallery (Australia).   It is currently bound by the thirty years rule by which documentation in British government institutions is not made publicly available until thirty years have passed, but in the interests of trying to understand and interpret the recent past, I hope they will not mind me making use of this file to help reconstruct a version of the history.

The first mention of the idea of establishing an Australian National Portrait Gallery appears in a letter Gordon Darling wrote to John Hayes, the previous Director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, on 7 April 1988.   In it, he refers to the fact that:-

I thought you would like to know confidentially that the National Portrait Gallery decision is likely to be taken by Cabinet some time after the present Parliament House has been vacated.   I had dinner one evening with the Minister and we had a very encouraging discussion.[3]

Such optimism was premature.   Just before Christmas 1988, he wrote again:

You will not be all that surprised to hear that the Federal Government have not yet made up their minds about what to do with Old Parliament House.   So the future of a National Portrait Gallery continues to hang on a thread !  If anything, I am encouraged by the delay and hopefully it will mean that the recommendation to become a Museum of Political Memorabilia will be thrown out.[4]

On 20 April 1989, the first press reference to the idea of a Portrait Gallery appears in The Bulletin as follows:-

Gordon Darling, former chairman of the Australian National Gallery, wants to see the now abandoned Parliament House turned into the National Portrait Gallery.   He visualises it containing not merely portraits of politicians, but of other notables who have contributed to the greatness of our country.   In London, the National Portrait Gallery has turned out to be one of the greatest successes of the past few years — up to 600,000 people going through it last year.   Such galleries are not restricted to one portrait of a certain person.   For instance, the London gallery has a whole corner with fascinating portraits and photographs of Churchill.   Gordon Darling says the old Parliament House, already having a fully equipped dining room, could provide a restaurant and a bar for those visiting the gallery.[5]

In other words, to paraphrase the sentiments expressed in this press cutting, the appeal of a Portrait Gallery was:-  first, as an act of public record of those who have contributed to the greatness of the nation, not just politicians, but those in other fields as well;  second, that this activity had the potential of being a popular and democratic way of increasing public interest in national history by analogy to the National Portrait Gallery in London;  and, third, that it would be like other equivalent forms of visitor attraction in having appropriate facilities, including, most importantly, a bar.

The next event was the appointment of a curator, Julian Faigan, to the post of exhibition curator for an exhibition which was planned to tour Australia in 1992 and 1993 entitled ‘Towards a National Portrait Gallery of Australia’.   The wording of the advertisement for a curator described the project as follows:-

The object of the Exhibition which will include all media is to show Australian art lovers and the public great portraits by outstanding Australian artists of Celebrated Australians from all walks of life, including the arts, education, science, business, sport and politics.   People from all states and from a variety of ethnic origins, including Aboriginals, will be properly represented.   Through this carefully chosen sample, the exhibition will foreshadow what could be displayed if Australia possessed a National Portrait Gallery.   It would be like one jewel in the National Portrait Gallery’s crown.[6]

As someone who has to write this type of copy, I am intrigued by the nuances of this phraseology.   The appeal is, first, to art lovers and only secondly to the public;  and in the wording describing the contents of the exhibition, they are expected to be ‘great portraits by outstanding Australian artists of Celebrated Australians’.   In other words, the fact that they are by outstanding artists comes first;  the fact that they are of Celebrated Australians (capital C, capital A) comes second.   I may be reading more into this than was intended;  but in London, in the concept of a Portrait Gallery, the sitter always comes first, the artist second.

The next paragraph of this advertisement is also fascinating.   It reads as follows:-

Today, many people believe an Australian “Hall of Fame” is overdue.   The enormous success of the National Portrait Galleries in London and in Washington is evidence of the enthusiastic response of students, scholars, tourists and the general public to viewing images of National Celebrities.

Here it is, in its Ur-form, the original idea for a National Portrait Gallery:  it is to be a “Hall of Fame”, although the idea that it should be a Hall of Fame was carefully put in inverted commas, thereby detaching it from being straightforwardly a Hall of Fame;  and it was for the viewing of National Celebrities (capital N capital C) who are not put in inverted commas, thereby assuming that the concept of who are National Celebrities is comparatively unproblematic.

This idea for the exhibition transmogrified in due course into the exhibition Uncommon Australians:  Towards an Australian Portrait Gallery, which opened at the National Gallery of Victoria on 7 May 1992.   This is a fine catalogue of an exhibition which demonstrated the full range of Australian portraiture from the portrait of Abel Tasman, his wife and daughter from the collection of the National Library of Australia in Canberra through to the portrait of Sir Donald Bradman by Bill Leak, dated 1990.   The exhibition was categorised in sections as follows:-  Exploration and Development;  Government, Law and Order;  Creative Australia;  Research, Education and the Media;  and Sporting Australia.

1994, the year of the foundation of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, was also the year that I joined the staff of the National Portrait Gallery in London as its Director.   It was both at the time and in retrospect an intriguing time to have taken up the role.   In Scotland, Timothy Clifford, the Director of the National Galleries of Scotland, had provoked a great deal of Scottish wrath by proposing that the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh should be absorbed into a new National Gallery of Scottish Art based in Glasgow.   In other words, in the same year that Australia was trying to open a National Portrait Gallery, Scotland was proposing to close its own portrait gallery down.   Some of the indignation was no doubt fuelled by the long-standing rivalry between the two cities, as if the new Director of the National Gallery of Victoria suggested that their new building might be much better placed in Sydney.   But underneath the argument was a recognition that a Portrait Gallery should not be just absorbed into a larger art institution because it is different in kind and character from a conventional art gallery:  its allegiances are at least as much to public history as they are to art;  and it is rather more assertively involved in the construction and representation of national identity than an equivalent art institution would be, which makes its geographical location into an issue of public and political concern.   In February 1994, these issues were being hotly contested in Edinburgh.   On 30 March 1994, the National Portrait Gallery opened in Canberra under the auspices of the National Library.

In retrospect, it is quite possible to see the problems which were going to arise from the catalogue of the first exhibition About Face:  Aspects of Australian Portraiture c.1770-1993.   In the introduction the Director-General of the National Library wrote of the enterprise as follows:-

When it became clear that the Australian government was prepared to support the establishment of a National Portrait Gallery located in Old Parliament House, the National Library was delighted to respond to the suggestion that it might undertake the management of this important and exciting initiative.   It did so, recognising that portraits and a related body of documentation comprise a significant part of its great holdings of Australiana which have been developed over a period of almost one hundred years.[7]

I love the phrasing of this.   The implication is that, if the government has decided in its wisdom to establish a National Portrait Gallery, then the National Library would agree to look after it, but that such an institution is really not necessary given the National Library’s existing holdings of Australiana.   He goes on:-

While the Library recognised that artistic and aesthetic considerations would be important in the development of a Portrait Gallery, it also held the view that such an enterprise would have the important responsibility to present exhibitions which offered a historical interpretation of Australian life and achievement.

What seems to have gone wrong with the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra in its first incarnation was the conflict between two equally valid, but potentially incompatible, motives in the foundation of a portrait gallery:  the first was the biographical and the celebratory;  and the second was the documentary and the archival.   Underneath the dispute as to whether or not the institution was stillborn was a conflict between rival interpretations of history, an essentially right-field interpretation that it is necessary to recognise the role and importance of human agency in the record of historical action;  and, on the other hand, a left-field aversion to anything which might smack of heroicization.   My own view of this issue was influenced by a conversation I had shortly after I joined the National Portrait Gallery in London with Grant McCracken, a Canadian sociologist, who I expected to adopt a sceptical view of an institution which necessarily emphasises the role of individuals in shaping historical destiny at the expense of broader and more anonymous forces.   He took the opposite view:  that it is essential in a democracy to educate people in a sense of the contribution which individuals can make to social and public welfare;  in other words, adopting a left-field, but non-Marxist, view that there was an entirely legitimate place for an open access, public institution which helps people to understand and interpret their own identity in the context of other people’s achievements in the present and the past.

What the early history of the foundation of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra exhibits in a very clear way is a central and potentially contradictory tension which lies underneath the notion of a National Portrait Gallery:  that it needs to hold together the needs for celebration and documentation.   If it becomes too nakedly celebratory, it runs the risk of being chauvinistic in an offensive way.   If it is too straightforwardly documentary, it is likely to be dull, losing the aura of achievement.   We still wish to recognise the possibilities of greatness, however much we may be inclined to debunk it.

The foundation of an Australian National Portrait Gallery provides a recent and reasonably well documented example of how such an institution came into being.   It also provides the tools for a comparative analysis of the other three National Portrait Galleries which currently exist internationally:  in Washington, Edinburgh and London.   As well, it provides a set of lessons to those other governments who are currently considering the possibility of establishing a National Portrait Gallery on a permanent basis:  at the moment, this includes the governments of New Zealand and Canada, most definitely;  and the governments of Romania and Pakistan, possibly.   The lessons are as follows.   How far does one want to restrict the representation of sitters to people who are well known ?  How far does one want it to be a place of national celebration or of more low-key documentary and archival record ?

*****

What the foundation of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra demonstrates is the way in which the idea of a National Portrait Gallery is defined by three vectors:  the belief in the necessity of the commemoration of individual achievement;  the idea that there is a need for a public awareness of history in a democracy;  and that the best and most effective way of achieving these things is through the medium of art.   I want to use these three vectors as a way of looking at the nature at the operation of the other three National Portrait Galleries.

I have, to my slight embarrassment, only been to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington once shortly after I was appointed.   It struck me then, and I have seen nothing to dispel this impression since, that it resolves the dichotomy between celebration and documentation by doing both, but separately.   Upstairs it has a Hall of Presidents which errs, to my taste, on the over-celebratory, an atmosphere of reverence which is reinforced by the architecture of the building in which the National Portrait Gallery is housed, the Old Patent Office, a Greek Revival building not far from the Mall and from Congress itself and which carries with it more than a slight aura of the mausoleum.   The National Portrait Gallery in Washington also subscribes to the rule which the National Portrait Gallery in London abolished shortly after Washington adopted it, namely that the sitter has to be dead for ten years before he or she is regarded as being eligible for the collection.[8]   This inevitably creates a Pantheonic aspect to the way the collection operates.   It is firmly about the past and subscribes to a view, now unfashionable, that history only begins to come into focus once those people who have been actors within it are dead.

In writing this, I began to wonder if perhaps I was misrepresenting Washington.   So I dialled up its web-site.   This is what I found as its introduction:

The concept of an American national portrait gallery is as old as our republic.   During the Revolutionary War, Charles Willson Peale took upon himself the mission of creating a gallery to portray the great men of his era.   The first official gesture toward assembling a national portrait collection was made in 1857, when Congress commissioned George Peter Alexander Healy to paint a series of presidential portraits for the White House;  however, it was not until about a century later that the National Portrait Gallery was finally established.   It is housed in the Old Patent Office Building, one of the oldest government structures in Washington, on the very site that Pierre Charles L’Enfant — in his original plan for the city — had designated for a pantheon to honor the nation’s immortals.[9]

This statement brilliantly encapsulates a view of history which is slightly more heroic than the one we try to represent in the National Portrait Gallery in London.   Note the appeal to a common destiny in the opening reference to ‘our republic’;  and the reference to the fact that the site had originally been intended ‘for a pantheon to honor the nation’s immortals’.   The language and the sentiments of nation-building live on.

Having said that, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington has an equally strong documentary aspect to it and, unlike the National Portrait Gallery in London, has a staff of professional historians, thereby institutionalising the internal differences of viewpoint between historians, who are interested in the life and significance of the sitters, and the art historians, who are interested in the nature and importance of the particular image.   These differences in viewpoint come out entertainingly in a recent article in the Washington Post in which the author, Bob Thompson, suggests to one of the staff historians that the National Portrait Gallery in Washington might be considered what the Washington Post itself once described it as ‘a modern Pantheon by the Potomac’.   He reports the response as follows:-

“I want you to choke every time you say that word !” says cultural historian Amy Henderson…Henderson, a onetime Jefferson scholar who’s become an expert on such phenomena as the Broadway musical and the early days of broadcasting, talks as volubly with her hands as with her voice (“I’m not a chamber music sort of person, I’m grand opera”).   But no mere gesture can express her contempt for the term “pantheon”, and she drives her point home with a series of gagging noises.   “It’s a Greek notion”, she explains when she calms down.   “It’s pan — all — gods, pan theos.   And this is not just godly territory.[10]

So much for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.   What about Scotland ?  If I think about the fact in the abstract that there are two National Portrait Galleries in Great Britain, thereby presuming that there are two different and quite separate nations, long before the establishment last year of a Scottish parliament, it strikes me that there ought to be more ambiguity in the relationship than in practice there is.   In fact, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery has some claim to be an institution with a longer ancestry than the English, since moves to establish a gallery of Scottish notables goes back to the period of the Scottish enlightenment when the printed Statutes of the Society of Antiquaries stipulated in 1783 that, ‘A room or gallery shall be appropriated for the collection of the best original Portraits, or, where such cannot be procured, the best copies of Portraits of illustrious and learned Scotsmen, and this apartment shall be denominated the Temple of Caledonian Fame’.   Indeed, the establishment of a National Portrait Gallery in London owes itself partly to the advocacy of the idea by Thomas Carlyle, who wrote in a letter to the Scottish collector and antiquary, David Laing, in 1854 that:

It has always struck me that Historical Portrait Galleries far transcend in worth all other kinds of national Collections of Pictures whatever;  that in fact they ought to exist…in every country, as among the most cherished National Possessions:-  and it is not a joyful reflection, but an extremely mournful one, that in no country is there at present such a thing to be found.

If the Scottish National Portrait Gallery owes its origins to very similar motives to the one in London — that is, the idea of antiquarian and historical record and the belief in the importance of celebrating those people who have contributed to the constitution of national identity — there are minor inflections of difference.   The chief of these is, I think, that sitters who are selected for incorporation into the collection do not necessarily have to be approved by the Board of Trustees, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage:  the advantage is that it gives the staff greater freedom in the selection of appropriate sitters;  the disadvantage is that their choice does not have quite the level of authority as when it has been discussed and debated by a body of the Great and the Good.   Indeed, one of the reasons that the Trustees of the National Galleries of Scotland advocated the broadening of the collections of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery into a National Gallery of Scottish Art, was because, as was argued in a series of highly tendentious and beautifully printed, anonymous pamphlets issued on St. Andrew’s Day 1993:

From Carlyle’s nineteenth-century Valhalla, limited to images of the great, the scope of the collection has been widened to present the history of the Scottish people.   Extending the scope of the collection has been a conscious and welcomed development, undertaken for much of this century by a succession of Keepers and Trustees.   Alongside the bemedalled portraits of famous generals can now be seen the portraits of the common soldiers.   Beside the Highland Chieftain now hangs his piper, beside the golfing laird, his caddie.   Carlyle might not have approved of this development, Smout surely would.[11]

This is stirring stuff.   In fact, one of the accompanying pamphlets went further and wrote, ‘If we do not have good images of whisky distilling, golf, curling, salmon fishing or stalking we must go out and find them’, which conjures up the picturesque image of the curators scouring the highways and byways of the Highlands for appropriate genre scenes and, where they do not exist, even ordering that they should be painted.

Anyway, it has been decided, after heated debate, that the National Gallery of Scottish Art is not to be, at least in the form that was recently proposed in Glasgow.   And the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, I’m pleased to say, remains in its fine late nineteenth-century Scottish baronial building on Queen Street surroundeed by the more austere streetscape of Edinburgh’s New Town.   It now has the opportunity to expand and grow into the other half of its building which has been vacated by the former Museum of Scottish Antiquities.

Now we come to the National Portrait Gallery in London.   As I said at the beginning of my lecture, my purpose in looking comparatively at the establishment and current operation of the other National Portrait Galleries internationally is to try to define the subtle differences in mandate by which we operate, to unpack the cluster of ideas which lie behind our respective operations.   Rather than talking generally about the National Portrait Gallery in London, I want to convey a flavour of the way it operates by talking you through the acquisitions made at the last meeting of the Board of Trustees.   The intention is that these should give you some idea of the range and diversity of what we collect and to exemplify the reality of our current modus operandi by looking not at the theory of what we do, but the practice.

The first picture the Trustees approved was a portrait of Horace Walpole, the eighteenth-century writer, wit and builder of Strawberry Hill by Sir Joshua Reynolds, the greatest of eighteenth-century English portrait painters.   The combination of artist and sitter is teasing, because they both did so much in their different ways to delineate mid-eighteenth-century London life, although I’m not convinced that Reynolds quite manages to convey Horace Walpole’s sarcastic intelligence.   This was a classic National Portrait Gallery acquisition:  the importance of both sitter and artist beyond dispute and the picture will sit comfortably alongside the writers, architects and intellectuals of London at its most prosperous and confident.

The second acquisition of the last meeting was a pair of pastels by John Russell of Captain Bligh and his wife, following Bligh’s return from the Mutiny on the Bounty.   Again, an uncontroversial and rather beautiful pair of portraits, although Elizabeth Bligh’s claim to fame rests only on the fact that she was married to a folk hero and was the person who was responsible for securing his appointment as a captain on the Bounty.   This was an acquisition which we hope will come to us through an acceptance of it by the Treasury in lieu of the payment of death duties by the previous owners and a recognition by the body which administers acceptance-in-lieu that we will be the best public location for the works to be displayed.

Next came a beautiful small neoclassical portrait of a classical topographer and numismatist, William Leake.   This came to us as a gift and is enhanced by the fact that it is by Christian Albrecht Jensen, one of the leading Danish portriat painters of the nineteenth century.   William Leake may not by himself be a name to conjure with, but we felt that it was an evocative portrait exemplifying a particular period of classical scholarship which had an international dimension to it.

Next was a drawing of a Victorian social reformer, Josephine Butler, who had been prominent in the movement for higher education of women and then had campaigned vigorously for improving the conditions of prostitutes, as recorded in her autobiography Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade, published in 1896.

The last of the nineteenth-century acquisitions was a portrait drawing of the artist Arthur Hughes, by John Brett from early in Hughes’s career.

Thus far the acquisitions were completely uncontroversial and what you might expect of a gallery devoted to the record of national history.   I hope you will acknowledge that the acquisitions are reasonably eclectic, although necessarily recognising the principle, which is central to the existence of the Gallery, that the sitter must have achieved some degree of pre-eminence in a particular field of activity.   We are not devoted to social historical record, although we are influenced by how far a picture can represent different walks of life.

Once we come to the twentieth century these decisions are necessarily trickier and it is at this point that the Trustees are required to act as a jury as to whether or not a particular individual is worthy of historical record.   At the last meeting we acquired a bust of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and a self-portrait of Ithell Colquhoun, an artist and writer associated with the occult and alchemy.   We acquired a portrait of the fifth Earl of Lonsdale, which oddly enough had been left to us in the will of the artist, John Lavery, when he died in 1941.   At that stage Lonsdale was still alive and, according to the Ten Years Rule, which used to operate, the Trustees could only accept it once Lonsdale had been dead for ten years.   In 1956, ten years after his death, it was turned down.   But when it reappeared at auction we felt that he was deserving of record as a great Edwardian sporting grandee, a famous huntsman and yachtsman and the founder of the so-called Lonsdale belt, well known for his side whiskers and nine-inch cigar.

So far I may have confirmed your expectations of the National Portrait Gallery in London as an institution bent upon the reification of the élite, a kind of Pommy graveyard.   This is certainly the impression which is given out in some of the literature associated with the recent re-opening of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, contrasting the democracy and eclecticism of the new world National Portrait Gallery with the stuffiness and élitisim of the old.   I want now to try to dispel that impression with some of our contemporary acquisitions.   At the last meeting, we acquired a photograph of the fashion designer, Jasper Conran, by the American photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, part of a group of photographs by Mapplethorpe, which also included Freya Stark, the great travel writer in the late stages of her career in a bath chair outside her house in Asolo in north Italy.   We acquired three photographs by a fine art photographer David Buckland, who has been experimenting with digitalisation and produced a series of works in which he places his sitters in imaginary settings based on their selection of an appropriate text.   Thus Fiona Shaw, the actress, appears as a winged angel hovering somewhere on a mountain top and holding in her left hand an eagle.   Sue Davies, a new wave dancer and choreographer, appears in a modern version of an Elizabethan miniature.   And Nigel Finch, the director of a famous series of television films, including one on the Ford Cortina appears in a glass double-sided memento mori in company with his partner, Rupert Hazeldon, mirroring their death from AIDS and based on the quote from W.H. Auden:

The stars are not wanted now:  put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can come to any good.

Next we acquired two photographs from our current, very successful exhibition Icons of Pop:  David Bowie and Queen by Mick Rock.   We ended with four commissions.   Nic Roeg, the film maker, by Michael Clark, immortalised as a strange cult object, replete with layers of symbolism, which is not to everyone’s taste.   Jonathan Miller, the polymathic popular scientist and opera director, was painted at his request by Stephen Conroy in an appropriately meditative pose, but also in Conroy’s characteristic neo-Edwardian style of slightly sinister polish.   Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones, the architect’s of our new extension, were painted by John Lessore, an artist in his late fifties, in situ in the backyard which has now disappeared and holding an expanded version of the model for their building project.   It is an image which I think is correctly redolent of 1950s utopian modernism.   Last amongst the commissions was Richard Branson, the great populist entrepreneur, founder of Virgin records, of Virgin Airways, and now of Virgin everything.   It’s a collage by the sculptor, David Mach, constructed out of 3000 postcards of the Gallery’s self-portrait of Dame Laura Knight.

I want to end this account of the Gallery’s current acquisitions policy with a portrait which resulted in a certain amount of discussion on the part of the Board of Trustees.   It is a large, double Self-portrait by the artists, Gilbert and George.   I should perhaps quote from the notes accompanying this acquisition as written by Honor Clerk, our twentieth-century curator, in a statement which is a miracle of dry understatement:

Gilbert and George are among a handful of British artists of the later twentieth century whose work is known, collected and exhibited worldwide.   The self-portrait, entitled ‘In the Piss’, is an uncompromising statement, though more obviously definable as a portrait than many of their works.   Its inclusion in the contemporary galleries on the ground floor might be regarded by some NPG visitors as sensationalist, but the small diptych black and white photograph by which at present they are represented in the collection hardly seems to do them justice.

In this statement I think one finds the essential spirit of the National Portrait Gallery in London.   It is self-consciously anti-sensationalist, concerned above all with figures of national worth, working within a genre which is sufficiently tightly defined in order to enable this work to be included as a Self-portrait whereas others of their works would trespass to too great an extent on the realms of narrative.   In most ways the Gallery continues to fulfil its original mandate with a remarkable sense of continuity, but is also liberal in its willingness to broaden the mandate to accomodate new professional categories of significance, including, for example, cooks and restaurateurs, as well as new types and styles of imagery.   The Gallery thus combines inflexibility and elasticity in its interpretation of its mission in a way which I find to be enjoyable and stimulating, so that we are forever walking the tightrope between, on the one hand, an excessive adherence to an interest in significant imagery only and, on the other, a pluralism and eclecticism which loses the original sense of purpose of the Gallery as a way of recording and celebrating the diversity of national achievement.

I hope, therefore, that this necessarily brief account of the way the four National Portrait Galleries operate will have given you a sense of the different attitudes and ideas that they necessarily incorporate.   The idea of a portrait gallery is not a monolithic concept, but is susceptible of different modes of interpretation, different nuances in the ways in which the Galleries confront their public and their history.

My sense of the first catalogue of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra in its new incarnation under the title The Possibilities of Portraiture is that it has begun to walk this tightrope between commemoration and documentation, between art and history, with intelligence and originality.   It has shown itself to be open to the powers of photographic imagery in the commemoration of fame, aware of the different ways that human lives are preserved in images, complex, sometimes necessarily ironic, as well as celebratory.   I wish the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra well.   It has got off to an excellent new start.   We from the other three portrait galleries on the other side of the world will watch its progress with interest and perhaps an occasional glimmer of jealousy.

---

[1]This is the text of a lecture given at a symposium on Portraiture and Society, organised by the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra and held at the Mitchell Library in Sydney on 25 September 1999.`

[2]The following account of the foundation of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra derives from personal information and, as is evident, from files in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London.   In addition, there is a published account of it in Joan Kerr, ‘The possibilities of a National Portrait Gallery’, Art Monthly, April 1999, no.118, pp.4-8.

[3]Gordon Darling to John Hayes, 7 April 1988, NPG Archive.

[4]Gordon Darling to John Hayes, 16 December 1988, NPG Archive.

[5]The Bulletin, 18 April 1989, p.113.

[6]Advertisement for a Curator, Towards a National Portrait Gallery, NPG Archive.

[7]About Face:  Aspects of Australian Portraiture c.1770-1993, p.1.

[8]The best readily available account of the foundation of the American National Portrait Gallery is Marcia Pointon, ‘Imaging Nationalism in the Cold War:  The Foundation of the American National Portrait Gallery’, Journal of American Studies, 1992, 26:3, pp.357-375.   I am greatly indebted to Carolyn Carr for providing me with a copy of this, as well as detailed comments on my draft.

[9]National Portrait Gallery, Washington website (www.npg.si.edu/inf/overview.htm)

[10]Bob Thompson, ‘America’s Hall of Fame:  The National Portrait Gallery and the culture of celebrity’, The Washington Post Magazine, 13 June 1999, p.15.

[11]The Development of the National Portrait Collection, National Galleries of Scotland, 1993, p.3.