National Portrait Gallery

The national portrait gallery was one of my favorite spots that we have visited so far. I was very fascinated with the amount of historical figures that have paintings there. It’s very captivating to see images of people who you have heard a lot about but have never had a close encounter with a piece of their history.

I also really enjoyed the gallery itself. It was organized very well and a lot of the rooms all had very different forms of portraits. The location of the gallery was also very nice and I found myself wondering around that part of town after our time at the gallery.

The Photo below is me with a painting from the artist I chose to research for this day. I chose this party because there was a joke that I look like the subject in the painting, but I also enjoy the way that he was painted. It almost has a rugged feel due to the texture and the colors used and it makes the subject seem more realistic to me.

The man in the painting is Aldous Huxley. Huxley was a novelist who had his success during the inter-war years in England. Huxley later wrote many books about society and how the future would bring a lot of problems.

Vanessa Bell is the artist who painted him. According to Art Uk, “her paintings produced after the First World War are tasteful and fairly conventional, in the tradition of the New English Art Club, but in the intervening years she was briefly in the vanguard of progressive ideas in British art.”https://artuk.org/discover/artists/bell-vanessa-18791961#

Portraits like the ones that Bell creates are what attracted me to this gallery. After seeing a lot of really eloborate and seemingly exaggerated portraits of royalty, it was refreshing to see a portrait of an author who was portrayed in his real form.