National Portrait Gallery, 2, Part The First

Our last week in London was one of tying up loose ends, finishing things off, not least the National Portrait Gallery, which we'd visited earlier in the month. On August 30th we completed the historical bits, a real treat for anyone interested in literary, philosophical, art, political, or other history, British or otherwise. Again, I'll post just a small fraction of what we saw, the ones omitted as great as those included. But it will take two posts. Amazing place!

Thomas Hardy

The Relief of Lucknow, Thomas Jones Barker, 1857; I include this
because the 20-some British officers depicted are said to be identifiable
portraits...but mainly because it affords the opportunity to mention
British reprisals in the mid-19th century Indian uprising...some 6,000
British were killed at the outset, against which an estimated 800,000
Indians were later massacred in reprisal...800,000...

John Stuart Mill, the great moral philosopher of
the 19th century

Tennyson, the great poet of the age

The three Bronte sisters, by their brother Branwell;
Branwell had painted himself out, but with the aging
of the paint, he is re-appearing, ghostily

Dickens

Pre-Raphaelites

Rosetti

Ruskin

William Morris

George Eliot

George V and family; very notably, the "spare,"
who would become George VI, was not included

Darwin

Beatrix Potter

Henry James

Conrad and Kipling

Churchill, c. 1916, in one of his darkest hours, having
been ousted from government for the Dardanelles catastrophe

Rupert Brooke

Ernest Shackleton