The Gallery is committed to reducing our environmental impact. This magazine is fully recyclable and has been produced by a certified carbon balanced printer. Their Partnership with the World Land Trust is helping to preserve and protect carbon rich habitats around the world.
I am thrilled to be writing to you as Director of the National Portrait Gallery, a role I began in October. It has been wonderful getting to know our extraordinary Collection, our team of people and supporters during my first months here, and we are looking forward to a great 2025.
Members sit at the heart of our community of supporters, and we are working hard as a Gallery to offer even more opportunities to deepen your involvement. I’m proud to say that this year we will have an increased programme of exclusive events for Members which you can read more about in this issue. With these greater ambitions in mind, we have asked our new Membership Trustee, Clive Humby, to introduce himself by writing about his favourite portrait in the Collection.
Highlights of our exhibitions programme in the year ahead include Jenny Saville’s first national museum survey in June, and an exhibition exploring the cultural impact of The Face magazine showcasing cutting-edge designers, photographers and musicians. Our Senior Curator, Photographs, Sabina Jaskott-Gill, tells us more about the exhibition in these pages.
In our second-floor exhibition galleries, we will be showing Edvard Munch: Portraits. For this exhibition, we welcome back Dr Alison Smith, former Chief Curator, to tell the story of Munch’s eventful life through the portraits he painted of his friends and family.
Following the reopening of the Gallery after the Inspiring People project, made possible through the generous support of our Members and supporters, we have welcomed an astonishing 2.7 million visitors, including 314,000 families and 140,000 under-16s. We have seen over double the number of visits from people with disabilities, underscoring our commitment to making the Gallery a space for everyone. In this issue, Belinda Sculley, Access Manager, tells us about her visit to the UNESCO International Disability Inclusion Conference in Paris last summer, just ahead of the Paralympic Games. Your support enables us to provide this rich exhibition programme, and to grow and protect our national collection of portraiture for future generations. I want to take this opportunity to thank you personally for being a Member and I look forward to meeting you at our events this year.
Victoria Siddall Director
My Favourite Portrait
by Clive Humby OBE Co-Opted Membership Trustee
As the new Co-opted Membership Trustee I was asked to write about my favourite portrait. Ada Lovelace stands out for me as a beacon of femininity amongst a selection of academic and industrial giants, men like Stephenson, Brunel, Babbage, Arkwright, McAdam, Davy, around her in Room 16, who laid the foundations of the Industrial Revolution and modern medicine, and allowed the world to truly prosper and grow.
She was twenty-one when the portrait was painted; just married, she had started her working relationship with Charles Babbage on the Analytical Engine. Her Notes on his analytical engine contain the foundations of all computer programming and, unlike those of her peers in the room, would lead to the Digital Revolution that has shaped the world today.
I am inspired by her, as she recognised the interface between metaphysics and mathematics, and her Notes on Babbage’s engine recognised that computing would have a profound impact on society as well as being a calculator.
My career has been about understanding people through data by analysing what they choose to buy and how they interact with business, and this has led to huge leaps in the efficiency of retailers around the world. At my company, Dunnhumby, we transformed the way grocers understand their customers by using data for loyalty cards; more recently, my wife’s charity, The Female Lead, looks at how women can share and learn from each other by finding inspirational female role models. Ada Lovelace has to be one of the first!
Clive Humby OBE is a British mathematician and data science pioneer, renowned for co-founding Dunnhumby, a company that revolutionised customer data analytics. Alongside his wife, Edwina Dunn, Humby developed Tesco’s Clubcard, one of the world’s first major supermarket loyalty programs, transforming retail marketing. His expertise in data mining earned him global recognition, influencing industries beyond retail. Humby famously stated, ‘Data is the new oil’, emphasising the growing importance of data in the digital economy.
Above – Ada Lovelace by Margaret Sarah Carpenter (née Geddes), 1836 (NPG L274)
Art and Champagne influence each other creatively and culturally, elevating the experience of both. Whether it’s through artistic bottle design or their mutual presence in creative circles, Champagne and art continue to celebrate craftsmanship, beauty, and the pursuit of the extraordinary.
It was a true privilege to lead our first masterclass at The Portrait Restaurant –a fantastic collaboration between the National Portrait Gallery, chef Richard Corrigan and Searcys. With a proud heritage in Champagne dating back to Victorian times, hospitality company Searcys was founded in 1847 by the confectioner and entrepreneur John Searcy.
For our inaugural masterclass, the Gallery’s Daniel Hausherr first gave guests an insightful tour around the Gallery, highlighting portraits where the character depicted had associations with a Champagne House. This was followed by a tutored tasting of the associated cuvées, in The Portrait Restaurant.
The tasting included Moët & Chandon Rosé Impérial, as Napoléon Bonaparte’s love of Moët Champagne dates from 1782, when the future Emperor was at military school and met Jean-Rémy Moët, who was selling the family ‘bubbles’. The two boys formed a lasting friendship that led to Napoléon visiting the Moët & Chandon house to stock up on cases of Champagne before each military campaign. He would say, ‘In victory I deserve it, in defeat I need it.’
We look forward to future collaborations between the art of the Gallery and the ‘bubbles’ of Champagne.
Visit www.npg.org.uk/visit/eat-and-drink/portraitrestaurant for future tasting events.
Above from top – Napoléon Bonaparte (‘Napoléon on St Helena’) (detail) by Benjamin Robert Haydon, before 1846, based on a work of 1830 (NPG 6266)
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (‘The Duke of Wellington Surveying the Field of Waterloo’) (detail) by Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1839 (NPG 6265)
Edvard Munch Portraits
by Alison Smith Director of Collections and Research, The Wallace Collection
(and former Chief Curator at the NPG)
Edvard Munch is one of the great celebrities of European painting – his powerful explorations of human psychology and sexuality such as The Scream, Jealousy and Madonna are icons of Symbolism. These famous images have, however, perhaps obscured his portraits, which represent a more objective side of Munch’s vision and which are the focus of a new exhibition opening at the NPG in March.
Viewed as a group, Munch’s portraits reveal him to be a more sociable person than is often assumed, with a wide network of contacts in the fields of law, business and science as well as across the art world of his day. By focusing on these portraits, the exhibition presents Munch as a man who felt as much at home in the mainstream of cosmopolitan European culture as he did on its extreme bohemian edge.
Edvard Munch Portraits shows how portraits formed a consistent thread in Munch’s art from the 1880s, first in Kristiania (now Oslo), then travelling in France and Germany, to his return to Norway following a nervous breakdown in 1908. The earliest portraits in the exhibition, of Munch’s
immediate family, already disclose flashes of the penetrating insight that was to mark the work of his maturity. Evening shows the artist’s older sister Laura staring fixedly ahead, as if isolated in her own world. Munch sought to capture his sister’s life-long mental instability, for which she was hospitalised soon after the portrait was completed. The symbolic aspect of Munch’s vision – his ability to look beyond surface appearances into what he called ‘the naked soul’ – was to become even more emphatic in his portraits of bohemian intellectual writers such as August Strindberg and Stanisław Przybyszewski, whom he befriended in Berlin and Paris. In such portraits, the focus is on the head gazing dispassionately at the viewer and sometimes with the head isolated from the body altogether, as if to reinforce a split between the physical and spiritual self as seen in Munch’s famous Self-portrait with Skeleton Arm.
His portrait style became more colourful and extrovert as he received commissions from a new class of wealthy patrons in Germany in the early twentieth century. Here he harnessed skills of observation with vibrant hues and loose brushwork to capture the self-assurance of men such as the industrialist and future politician Walther Rathenau, who epitomised Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideal of the Übermensch. Many of these patrons experienced a rapid downturn in fortune during the inflationary inter-war period, some further through the rise of the National Socialist party in the 1920s: Rathenau was himself shot by far-right extremists in 1922, much to Munch’s horror.
Edvard Munch Portraits concludes with portraits of Munch’s friends, patrons,
servants and models following his return to Norway. By this time he had achieved fame and wealth and devoted himself to his art in his various properties along the Oslo fjord, above all at Ekely, outside the city. As before, the overwhelming majority of the later portraits are of men, reflecting the predominantly masculine circles in which he moved and his dependence on his ‘guardians’, a group who protected the artist and his reputation. Indeed, so dependent was Munch on friends such as Jappe Nilssen and Christian Gierloff that he immortalised them in life-size portraits, several of which feature in the exhibition. These were not for sale, but were kept by him as a kind of protective bodyguard or shield against the external world.
Edvard Munch Portraits
From 13 March until 15 June 2025
Floor 2 Exhibition Gallery
Tickets £21 (Concessions 10% off / Under 25s on Fri/Sat/Sun £5)
Members and Patrons go free
Headline Supporter: AKO Foundation
Supported by Viking and Asbjorn Lunde Foundation
Above
Edvard Munch Portraits Hardback, £35
Edited and essay by Alison Smith with contributions from Knut Ljøgodt
To receive your exclusive Gallery Supporters’ 10% discount, show your member’s card in-store or enter the code MEMBER2025 at the checkout online – npgshop.org.uk.
Walther Rathenau by Edvard Munch, 1907. KODE, Bergen Art Museum, Bergen. KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes Photo: Fosse, Dag/KODE.
Welcome to our new Director
by Denise Vogelsang Director of Audiences
Our new Director, Victoria Siddall, joined the National Portrait Gallery in late October. Her appointment as the Gallery’s thirteenth permanent Director follows the departure of the previous post-holder Dr Nicholas Cullinan OBE, who left the Gallery to lead the British Museum in June 2024, and our Interim Director Michael Elliott, who oversaw the organisation in the intervening period during the summer.
Victoria has over twenty years’ experience of leadership positions in the art world, in both the public and private sectors. She began her career at Christie’s in 2000 after graduating from Bristol University with a degree in English Literature and Philosophy. She joined Frieze in 2004, first as Head of
Development, and in 2012 she launched Frieze Masters as the fair’s inaugural Director. In 2015, Victoria took over from the founders of the organisation as Global Director of the Frieze fairs, leading four international art fairs across London, New York and Los Angeles. After securing the launch of Frieze Seoul, she became a nonexecutive Director of Frieze in March 2022.
Victoria joined the board of Studio Voltaire in 2012 and became Chair of the Trustees in 2014. Studio Voltaire is a nonprofit gallery and artist studio complex in south London that plays a vital role in the local community as well as on the global stage. During her tenure she oversaw a major capital redevelopment campaign
‘I’m truly honoured to have the opportunity to lead the National Portrait Gallery, a museum that holds the world’s greatest collection of portraits and is unique in being about people and for people. The art within its walls tells stories of human achievement and what unites us as a society, inspiring and shaping our view of the world and our place in it. This is perhaps the most exciting time in the NPG’s history, following the recent reopening and Inspiring People project that the team delivered so flawlessly under Nicholas Cullinan’s leadership.
The perfect stage has been built and I am thrilled to work with my new colleagues, the museum’s Trustees, supporters, Members and of course the artists, as we look to the future and embark on a new chapter.’
– Victoria Siddall Director, National Portrait Gallery
‘I am delighted to welcome Victoria Siddall as the new Director of the National Portrait Gallery. Her strengths as a cultural leader are considerable, as is her knowledge of the art world, understanding of audiences and international profile. I know that she has the vision and determination to build on our recent successes and lead the next stage of the Gallery’s development, and I greatly look forward to working with her.’
– David Ross Chairman of the Trustees, National Portrait Gallery
and Studio Voltaire reopened in 2021 with significantly increased and improved artist studio spaces and public programmes.
Most recently, she co-founded Gallery Climate Coalition and Murmur, two charities that drive environmental responsibility in the art and music sectors, and for the past two years she has also worked with Tate in a strategic advisory capacity. She is a Trustee of the Ampersand Foundation, a UK grantawarding trust dedicated to supporting the visual arts. From July 2023 to August 2024, Victoria was a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, having served on our Reopening Committee for the year prior to that.
Look out for a special interview with Victoria in the next issue of Face to Face, where she will talk about her first few months in the role and her vision for the Gallery’s future.
Few magazines inspire such a devoted following as The Face – a trailblazing title that has radically disrupted youth culture in Britain and beyond since its launch in 1980, combining innovative photography with striking design and bold editorial content. It quickly became a cult magazine shaping the tastes of the nation’s youth. It also launched the careers of many of today’s leading names in music, fashion and photography.
The Face was started by Nick Logan, an editor who had transformed the fortunes of the New Musical Express in the 1970s before successfully launching the teen music magazine Smash Hits. Logan spotted an opening for a monthly title aimed at a youth audience interested in subjects not featured in glossy fashion publications, teen
magazines or music weeklies. He invented a new genre of publishing: the style magazine.
The timing was key, riding on the surge in creativity and youth energy of the punk movement in the late Seventies. Logan launched The Face with this punk spirit, using his own savings: a risky manoeuvre that gave him complete creative freedom. As an independent publication, with an editor promising creative autonomy, it attracted the most innovative writers, designers and photographers of its time.
Logan put his trust in these young creatives, and they were often the first to spot a new cultural phenomenon and feature it in the magazine – from the fabulous fashions of the Blitz Club and the vibrant Eighties London club scene to the key protagonists of Britpop and Cool Britannia in the hedonistic mid-Nineties. In the Noughties, The Face brought UK Garage and rap music to the mainstream. Over this period, when information was shared primarily through magazines rather than social media, British music and culture would have looked very different without The Face.
To quote Ekow Eshun, a former contributing editor, ‘This was another great magazine era when The Face, alongside other independently published style magazines like i-D and Dazed & Confused, spoke with thrilling dynamism and artistry; when story after story captured a scene or a subculture, understanding it both as a short-lived trend but also as a common feeling, a shared belief by a group of devotees in something they deemed precious and beautiful.’
From the outset, Logan envisaged a magazine that celebrated the best of contemporary photography, and offered image-makers the freedom to produce radically innovative work– which subsequent editors and art directors have continued to champion. This is the focus of our spring exhibition, The Face Magazine: Culture Shift, which celebrates the magazine’s most iconic images, and explores its pivotal role in transforming fashion photography.
The exhibition features portraits of the most exciting music stars and celebrities of the Eighties, Nineties and Noughties –from The Specials to the Spice Girls, David Bowie to David Beckham – and charts the transformation of British music and culture across these decades.
It also foregrounds how fashion photography evolved within the magazine’s pages – from the innovative styling and casting of Ray Petri and his Buffalo collective in the Eighties, to the strippedback authenticity of photographers such as Corinne Day and David Sims and stylists including Melanie Ward, who were disrupting the glamour and excess of fashion photography in the early Nineties. As photography evolved from analogue to digital formats, The Face also encouraged photographers to explore the creative potential of new image manipulation programs, which resulted in bold, colourful and ‘hyperreal’ images, pushing fashion photography in a new direction – a return to glamour but with a contemporary twist.
Left – John Lydon by Sheila Rock, December 1980. Sheila Rock Photography.
Men’s Where? by Jamie Morgan, November 1984. Photography by Jamie Morgan.
Bringing together photography from five decades of The Face has certainly required collaboration and cooperation on a grand scale. The Face Magazine: Culture Shift has been curated with two former Face contributors – Lee Swillingham, its Art Director between 1992 and 1999, and the photographer Norbert Schoerner, whose work appeared in the magazine throughout the Nineties and Noughties.
Together, we reviewed every issue of the magazine, and began the lengthy process of tracking down the key images we wanted to include. It proved a significant undertaking to locate many of the original negatives, transparencies and prints, and we are incredibly grateful to all the photographers who took the time to search their archives. The result of these efforts is the most comprehensive survey of the magazine’s photographic imagery to date, featuring over 200 photographic prints from over 80 photographers. Most of these images have
previously appeared only within the pages of the magazine, and for many, it will be the first time they are seen outside this context and appreciated as photographic prints.
Behind each image are the models and sitters, as well as the stylists, art directors and creative teams who conceived and produced them. Many of these contributors have talked to us about their experiences at the magazine, providing unique first-hand insights into the making of the images, as well as thoughtful commentary on the magazine’s cultural significance, and their voices will feature throughout the exhibition and the accompanying publication.
This exhibition represents a unique opportunity for the Gallery to celebrate The Face and all its contributors. The enthusiasm from everyone involved is testament to the overwhelming admiration felt for the magazine and its remarkable history.
The Face Magazine: Culture Shift
From 20 February until 18 May 2025
Floor 0 Exhibition Gallery
Tickets £23 (Concessions 10% off / Under 25s on Fri/Sat/Sun £5)
Members and Patrons go free
The exhibition is curated by the National Portrait Gallery in collaboration with Curatorial Consultants Lee Swillingham and Norbert Schoerner.
The Face Magazine: Culture Shift Hardback, £45 Paperback £29.95
With contributions from Ekow Eshun, Sabina JaskotGill, Jamie Morgan, Pete Paphides and Matthew Whitehouse, and interviews between Nick Logan and Lee Swillingham; Neville Brody, Jill Furmanovsky and Sheila Rock; Elaine Constantine, Glen Luchford and Nancy Rohde; and Norbert Schoerner and Stéphane Sednaoui.
To receive your exclusive Gallery Supporters’ 10% discount, don't forget to show your member’s card in-store or enter MEMBER2025 at the checkout online – npgshop.org.uk.
I was privileged to represent the National Portrait Gallery at the recent International Disability Inclusion Conference, coorganised by UNESCO and the International Paralympic Committee at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris this summer.
Taking place on the eve of the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games, the Conference brought together over 700 participants from across the world, including 32 Ministers, Vice-Ministers and Secretaries of State, 15 Paralympians, and a range of public and private sector specialists.
On a panel discussing ‘People with Disabilities: Holders of Cultural Rights at the Forefront of Inclusivity and Cultural Diversity’, I shared highlights of the Gallery’s Inspiring People project, emphasising our enhanced site accessibility, community programming and Gallery resources, designed collaboratively with and for audiences with access needs; these initiatives have resulted in a threefold uplift of visits from people with disabilities since the reopening in 2023.
I stressed that culture, along with sport, can be a powerful catalyst for social transformation by mainstreaming disabilities, shifting attitudes and perceptions towards people with disabilities, and, crucially, driving policies that empower and support them. As a public body and sector leader, this is a responsibility that the Gallery does not take lightly. Committed to continual improvement and learning,
our team strives to ensure the Gallery is accessible and inclusive to all.
More than 16% of the world population, or one in six of us, experience significant disability (WHO, 2023). The right for everyone to access culture and participate in cultural life equally is at the core of inclusion; it is a fundamental right as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).
UNESCO’s report Paris 2024 Call to Action is the legacy of the conference, a summary of panellist recommendations and a roadmap encouraging and tracking policy changes and increased investment in Para sport, promoting disability inclusion internationally.
Six British Paralympic Athletes by John Lessore, 2004 (NPG 6669)
Jane Austen Returns
by Catharine MacLeod Senior Curator, 17th-Century Collections
The National Portrait Gallery’s drawing of Jane Austen by her sister Cassandra is a particularly rare and special object. When the author’s nephew James Edward AustenLeigh was writing his Memoir of Jane Austen in the late nineteenth century, he searched through family possessions and papers to find a portrait of her that could be engraved as a frontispiece to his book. The only one he could find was this unfinished sketch. It is therefore the only known record of the face of the much-loved author. But even this drawing, made by someone who knew her so well, may not reveal much about Austen’s actual appearance. Her niece Caroline voiced an opinion generally held by her relatives: ‘There is a look which I recognise as hers – and though the general resemblance is not strong, yet as it represents a pleasing countenance it is so far a truth.’
The drawing is fragile and susceptible to fading, and therefore it cannot be permanently on display, but it will return to Room 5 on the Gallery’s 3rd floor from 9 December 2024, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth, until mid February 2025. Then it will travel to The Home of the Arts in the Gold Coast, Australia, as part of the exhibition Writers Revealed, an NPG collaboration with the British Library, opening in April 2025. Writers Revealed brings together for the first time writers’ portraits from the Gallery and their manuscripts, letters and books from the British Library, spanning 500 years of English literature. It will include such historical treasures as the portrait of the Brontë sisters by their brother Branwell, along with Charlotte Brontë’s manuscript of Jane Eyre, and more contemporary
works like Donald MacLellan’s photograph of Benjamin Zephaniah and his manuscript poem ‘What Stephen Lawrence Has Taught Us’. Jane Austen’s portrait will be reunited not just with her careful notes of readers’ opinions on Mansfield Park but also with the writing desk at which she wrote her six extraordinary novels. These juxtapositions will offer international audiences a closer encounter with one of Britain’s most admired but most self-effacing authors, who famously described her own work as ‘the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour’.
Above – Jane Austen by Cassandra Austen, c.1810 (NPG 1630)
A Quest for Harry Diamond
by Maria Andrews
Collaborative
Doctoral Student, Curatorial
In 2012 the NPG acquired 25 boxes comprising negatives, contact sheets, prints, camera and ephemera of an East-End London native, of German Jewish heritage, photographer Harry Diamond (1924–2009).
From the 1940s onwards Diamond associated with painters Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Stephen Finer, Francis Bacon and the picture editor of The Sunday Times, Bruce Bernard. Diamond’s nickname for Francis Bacon was the guvnor. A secretive man, with a reputation as a street fighter, Diamond generates myth.
As a Stepney-born photographer and pioneering scholar of Diamond, embarking on a collaborative studentship between Central St Martins, UAL and the National Portrait Gallery, my calling is to quest for ‘the real Harry Diamond’.
We know that Diamond worked as a stagehand in West End theatres and was free to pose in the afternoons for Freud between 1949 and 1951. The result, Interior at Paddington (1951), became a badge of honour for both men, by securing a spot in the National Collection (The Walker Gallery, Liverpool).
Imagine the heart-stop, when on my first day researching Diamond, I stumbled upon some colour transparencies he took of artist Peter Blake, posing with a plate of doughnuts. Diamond’s visual signature shone through: a rich brown interior surrounding Blake, contrasted by brightly coloured icing –a cross between a Dutch master and pop art.
Harry Diamond’s archive is full of such jolts of recognition, confirming portraiture’s power: not least, the host of Jazz and R&B
legends such as Viola Wills who Diamond met in Ronnie Scott’s club, where he worked as a cleaner.
I smell the streets in Diamond’s images. He is reported to have wept one day, when he realised the last of London’s fogs had passed. As a child, I knew that grief! Such recognitions feed the thrill, each time I bring anyone who remembers Harry Diamond into the Gallery’s public study room, to share Diamond’s precious rose of on-looking.
The rose of on-looking is a phrase from a poem written in 1918 by Wallace Stevens, Le Monocle de Mon Oncle. I feel it conveys an emotional warmth between sitter and portrait maker, emblematic of what Diamond’s archive has to offer.
Right – Viola Wills by Harry Diamond, 1970s (NPG x210088)
UK/Poland Cultural Season 2025: Stanisław Wyspianski
by Charlotte Bolland Senior Curator, Research and 16th-Century Collections
This spring, a partnership with the National Museum in Kraków and the National Museum in Poznan´, organised with the support of the Polish Ministry of Culture and the Polish Cultural Institute, will bring a group of portraits by the great Polish artist Stanisław Wyspianski ´ (1869–1907) to the United Kingdom for the first time.
Wyspianski ´ is widely celebrated as a painter, designer, poet and the originator of modern Polish theatre. In the late nineteenth century, he was also the creator of an extraordinary group of portraits of personalities associated with the Young Poland movement, based in Kraków, where he lived. This group sought to assert a national identity for Poland at a time when the country had been partitioned by occupying forces.
The display comprises sixteen of Wyspianski’s most outstanding portraits, most of which have never been seen outside
Poland. Drawn rapidly in pastel in bold lines, the portraits depict writers and artists as well as Wyspianski’s ´ family and some of the actors who performed in the plays he wrote and directed.
The striking images include portraits of the doctor Kazimierz Lewandowski lounging in his tightly fastened coat and top hat, and the melancholy six-year-old Józio Feldman wearing Polish folk dress. Lewandowski was a doctor and dentist by training who wrote poetry and published Early Spring of Young Poland, a volume reminiscing about Cracovian bohemia at the turn of the century. Józio was the son of Maria and Wilhelm Feldman, who were both part of Kraków’s intellectual elite. Wilhelm edited the literary magazine Criticism, which published contributions from the most outstanding poets and writers of Young Poland. A close friend of Wyspianski ´ , Wilhelm helped to sell his drawings and ultimately became his literary executor.
Perhaps the most powerful image in the display is a self-portrait by the artist, drawn shortly before his death from syphilis aged only thirty-eight. The progression of the disease damaged his hands, rendering him
Above left – Kazimierz Lewandowski by Stanisław Wyspiański, 1898. National Museum in Kraków. Photo: Bartosz Cygan/ NMK Digitization Studio.
Above – Dagny Juel-Przybyszewska by Stanisław Wyspiański, 1899. Krzysztof Musiał Collection.
unable to draw or paint by the end of 1905. However, in his final months he regained some dexterity and summoned the skill to record, hauntingly, his own mortality. His physical frailness at this time was recorded by his friend, the novelist Władysław Stanisław Reymont, who later recalled how
Above from top – Józio Feldman by Stanisław Wyspiański, 1905. National Museum
Self-portrait before death by Stanisław Wyspiański, 1907. National Museum in Kraków. Bartosz Cygan, Mateusz Szczypiński/NMK Digitization Studio.
Wyspianski ´ ‘had a hollow, blackened, and dry face, his right hand was bandaged, he had only partial command of his left hand, the voice of a stranger, indistinct, only his eyes resembled his old self, imperious and wise, full of flashes and indomitable will’.
The display has been curated by Dr Alison Smith and Professor Andrzej Szczerski, Director of the National Museum of Kraków, with an accompanying publication edited with Julia Griffin. It complements the exhibition Edvard Munch: Portraits, offering visitors the opportunity to see Wyspianski’s ´ portrait of Munch’s close friend Dagny Juel-Przybyszewska, who played a key role in introducing Munch’s work to artists in Kraków.
Stanisław Wyspianski: Portraits will be on display from 27 March until 13 July 2025 in Room 14, Floor 3. Free entry.
The display at the National Portrait Gallery is realised in cooperation with the Polish Cultural Institute in London. It is part of the UK/Poland Season 2025 The Alchemy of Culture.
Co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage under the ‘Inspiring Culture’ Programme.
Display Co-organiser:
Display Partner:
Stanisław Wyspianski
Portraits
Hardback, £19.95
Edited by Alison Smith with Julia Griffin
To receive your exclusive Gallery Supporters’ 10% discount, don't forget to show your member’s card instore or enter the code MEMBER2025 at the checkout online – npgshop.org.uk.
in
From the Head of Membership
The moment when this Face to Face issue reaches you will mark my two months as Head of Membership in this wonderful institution. The work of the National Portrait Gallery would not be possible without your support and as a thank you we are looking at our programmes, exclusive events and offers to ensure that there are many opportunities for you to enjoy the Gallery to its fullest.
The National Portrait Gallery has over 220,000 portraits in its Collection, the most extensive in the world. Our events programme attempts to shed a light on stories and lives of celebrated people and we invite you to explore these stories with us. I am particularly excited to hear Paul Cox, our Curator of the Reference Collection, and to see original portraits in the Heinz Archive & Library on 18 March, but also to tour with guide Daniel Hausherr, around Westminster to discover where famous figures lived or visited, and to learn more about the Gallery’s Collection. Stay tuned for more exclusive Members’ tours this year by checking regularly on our events pages, as we will keep programming more than what is included in your What’s On guide: npg.org.uk/members-events.
We’ve got two exclusive Members’ views of new exhibitions also coming up, so you can enjoy them before the public: The Face: Culture Shift on 19 February and Edvard Munch’s Portraits on 12 March. Check your Save the Date leaflet for more Members’ exclusive views of our exhibitions as well as our exhibitions pages online.
Last but not least, I hope you have had the chance to enjoy your exclusive pop-up Members’ Lounge inside Larry’s bar and dining. Between 11am and 3pm, enjoy the sunlit space, reserved just for our Members and their guests, refuel with delicious refreshments and complete your visit.
Thank you again for your support and we look forward to welcoming you to the Gallery.
Head of Membership
Above right from top – The Funeral Procession of Arthur, Duke of Wellington by Samuel Henry Gordon Alken and George Augustus Sala, 1853 (NPG D42981)
Did you know that monthly behind-thescenes events designed exclusively for Members are a benefit of National Portrait Gallery Membership? We’re on a mission to spread the word about this specially curated programme of ticketed events that you can book to explore hidden parts of the Gallery and delve deeper into its stories. It offers special experiences not available to the general public: you have the chance to buy tickets for three events each season, in addition to the Members’ previews and Lates that accompany each exhibition run. This spring each event will be a tour, offering a unique insight into the workings of the Gallery and some of the incredible sitters contained within our historic collection.
National Portrait Gallery Architecture Tour
Friday 7 February | 18.00–19.30
Discover the architecture of the National Portrait Gallery, originally designed in 1896 by Ewan Christian and now transformed by Jamie Fobert Architects, whose sensitive redevelopment, revealed in June 2023, was recently nominated for the RIBA Stirling Prize 2024. Join Jamie Fobert CBE, who will lead you through the historic spaces, and learn the secrets we uncovered during the building work including major changes that brought the Gallery into the twenty-first century.
National Portrait Gallery Reference Collection Tour
Tuesday 18 March | 18.30–19.30
Join us for a special tour of the Reference Collection, exclusively for Members. The evening includes a talk by Paul Cox, Curator of the Reference Collection, and a chance to see original portraits and have a tour of the Heinz Archive & Library. As well as the
Gallery’s library and institutional archive, the Heinz Archive & Library houses our extensive Reference Collection of portraits. Largely consisting of prints, the Reference Collection also includes portraits in other media, such as sculpture and ceramics. This is an exciting opportunity to see these portraits, which are rarely on display. You will get to see a range of items up close, including prints by the renowned Georgian satirist James Gillray and even a portion of the Duke of Wellington’s funeral panorama extending over 20 metres, a real hidden gem of our Collection. You will also get to visit areas not accessible to the public and get a sneak behind-the-scenes look at the basement storage area.
Westminster Tour
Friday 11 April | 17.30–19.00
Join us for an exclusive Members-only walking tour around Westminster as our tour guide, Daniel Hausherr, reveals connections between people in the Gallery’s Collection and significant locations nearby. Journeying to where famous figures lived or were known to have visited, and stopping by their statues that you might not have noticed before, this tour will give you the opportunity to learn more about the Gallery’s Collection from the city that surrounds it.
Tickets for each of the exclusive Members’ tours are available at £25 per person. You can book online from 16 December 2024 at my.npg.org.uk.
NEW IN OUR GALLERY SHOP
for Gallery Supporters
EXCLUSIVE LIMITED EDITION:
‘England’s Dreaming’ by Corinne Day, August 1993
To coincide with our new exhibition The Face Magazine: Culture Shift, we are delighted to share a limited-edition print of ‘England’s Dreaming’ by Corinne Day, August 1993.
Set in the photographer’s London flat, this striking image features model Rosemary Ferguson, languidly lying on a sofa, surrounded by dirty coffee mugs and used ashtrays. Styled by Melanie Ward, the image appeared in The Face magazine as part of Day’s 1993 fashion story titled This is the Modern World.
A self-taught and influential photographer, Day in her work captured a cool, laid-back aesthetic that was groundbreaking in 1990s fashion photography. The hand-numbered edition of 150 will feature the embossed stamp of the Corinne Day Estate and will be available exclusively from our shops and online store from February 2025. This highquality A3 print comes in a black folio with a certificate of authenticity.
To receive your exclusive Gallery Supporters’ 10% discount, show your member’s card in-store or enter the code MEMBER2025 at the checkout online – npgshop.org.uk
