National Portrait Gallery

National Portrait Gallery, London.
The national collection of portraits of eminent British men and women. It was founded in 1856 at the urging of the historian and politician Philip Henry Stanhope, 5th Earl Stanhope, who was the first chairman of the trustees. The collection was originally housed at 29 Great George Street, Westminster, and the present premises, adjoining the National Gallery, were opened in 1896. The criterion for inclusion in the Gallery is the celebrity of the sitter rather than the quality of the portrait, so the pictures in the collection vary enormously in artistic merit, from an acknowledged masterpiece such as Holbein's cartoon of Henry VIII to the wholly amateurish representation of the three Brontë sisters by their brother Branwell. Nevertheless, because portraiture has played such a great part in the history of British art, many illustrious artists are well represented. Recently the Gallery has begun to commission portraits of living sitters, and since 1980 it has organized a series of annual portrait awards for artists under 40 years old. From the 1970s it has collaborated with several historic houses outside London, in which works from the Gallery are displayed in appropriate period settings: the main ones are Montacute House in Somerset, Beningbrough Hall in Yorkshire, and Bodelwyddan Castle in Wales. The Scottish National Portrait Gallery was established in Edinburgh in 1882, and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington in 1962.