National Portrait Gallery

The gallery was founded in 1856 on an unusual principle: it collects portraits of significant British people, and the criterion for acquisition is the importance of the sitter rather than the quality of the painting or the fame of the painter, which is the opposite of how art collections normally work. It holds around a quarter of a million portraits including some fourteen thousand primary works, from the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, the first picture the gallery acquired and the only likeness with a reasonable claim to being painted from life, through Tudor and Stuart courts to contemporary photography. The building of 1896 was extended in 2000 and reopened in 2023 after a three-year redevelopment that reversed the entrance to the north facade and rehung the collection. Entry to the permanent displays is free.

What you actually see

• The Chandos Shakespeare - the gallery's first acquisition and a likely life portrait.
• The sitter-first principle - a collection built on who is shown, not who painted it.
• The Tudor rooms - court portraiture from the sixteenth century.
• The 2023 rehang - a redevelopment that reordered the whole collection.

When to go

Year-round; free and open daily, busiest at weekends and during school holidays. The annual portrait photography prize exhibition draws large numbers. Late openings on some evenings are the quietest time.

Honest expectations

Special exhibitions are ticketed separately and often sell out. The collection is large and the chronological route is long. Because acquisition follows the sitter, the artistic quality varies enormously and some rooms are visibly weaker than others.

Nearby

Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery are next door; Covent Garden lies east.