Stop Staring at Me

Enough of the mundane stuff for a while. Today I went to the National Portrait Gallery, one of the many free museums in London. I was in the mood to see some art, but wanted it to be a bit more approachable, and portraits certainly fall into that category.

The whole gallery itself is a pretty remarkable concept. It has been around since 1856, and I guess the first portrait it acquired was one of William Shakespeare. Today it has everything from portraits of the Tudors to photographs of the CEOs of Orange and Vodaphone. Mostly Brits, yes, but lots of others who are influential to British history as well. I saw portraits of David Bowie, Edmund Burke, Mary Queen of Scots, the Queen Mother, Winston Churchil, Lord Nelson, ...I could go on and on. It was a pretty neat gallery but after a couple of hours I had the weird feeling that all the pictures were looking at me. After all most of them are painted that way with the wandering eyes.

The gallery keeps on getting bigger - since 1980 they have been commissioning new portraits of influential folks, and they also sponsor a portrait of the year award (well, BP does) , so there was a roomful of new portraits of all kinds of anonymous figures. Pretty amazing stuff.