Review: National Portrait Gallery

After working a 12 hour day on Tuesday I flew to Canberra early Wednesday morning for a full day of meetings. As luck would have it I was able to finish my work early and by 3:30 pm I had met with everyone I needed to, dropped by all my friends in the Canberra Office and discussed every possible report with every possible person. As my colleague had hired a car for the day we decided to go to the national portrait gallery in Parkes which is a suburb very close to Parliament House in Canberra.

Visiting the portrait gallery was a very enjoyable experience.

The building is very new and quite beautiful. It has sharp model lines and architecture but inside is warm and inviting. I was particularly taken with the bathroom and took several photos of the vanity units which I would like to use when we renovate our house.

The portraits in the gallery ranged in medium, size and shape. There were photos, sculptures, painting that looked like people and paintings that looked like blobs that represented people. I was asked in next day which was my favorite and couldn't think of any. But some of my highlights would be Princess Mary, John and Jeanette Howard, Justice Kirby and some of the Indigenous portraits.















One of the best things about the gallery was the descriptions of the person in each portrait. I think they were designed to make the reader interested in the person and to inspire the reader to follow up and find out more about the person. They achieved this by combining odd facts in short sentences without much flow or explanation.

One of the classics was " she had 5 remarkable children". This was confusing to me and I had no idea if the lady in question had 20 children of whom 5 were remarkable or if she had only 5 children all of whom were remarkable.

Another description explained the way the subject had died - "he shot himself in the back of the house". I must admit I thought the last word in the sentence was going to be head and had to read the sentence again just to make sure. Why is where is the house he shot himself part of a one paragraph summary about him? How is that in any way important?

I wondered what they would write next to my portrait. I suggest the following:

Long Dark Hair Blue Eyes (1979 - ) This oil on canvas painting of the much loved public servant was painted in 2003 after her first year in office. Inspired by Elizabeth of Bavaria, Long Dark Hair was not painted or photographed after her 30th birthday, making this image of her the most recent. She is best know for her ability to remember song lyrics and write odd blog posts.