For this new edition of Art After Dark, we take a trip with curator and broadcaster Kate Bryan to the newly refurbished National Portrait Gallery, reopened a few months ago after a £41.3 million, three-year transformation. As well as creating a new entrance, and opening up the historically closed galleries to the original daylight, the team behind it has enriched the collection to reveal many more female artists, female sitters, and both artists and sitters of colour, bringing them out from where they languished in storage, or purchasing them anew with the help of the Chanel Culture Fund.
"We’re meant to reflect Britain as it is, and obviously, if your collection only represents a fraction of Britain, then that’s a problem,” the gallery’s director Nicholas Cullinan told the Standard. “We serve Britain, we’re funded in part by the British people, and we also serve an international audience; it’s our duty to represent that. And that includes diversifying the collection in all senses, and achieving gender balance.”
The refurbishment has been welcomed across the board as a triumph. "That these galleries now have windows, rescued after decades behind false walls, seems symbolic. We’re seeing this great and, yes, complicated collection in a new light," said the Standard's reviewer when the gallery opened.
In this brand new edition of our video series, Bryan takes our Culture Editor Nancy Durrant on a tour of the historic galleries, and shows us some of her favourite pieces – and takes her up to marvel at what might be the best view from a restaurant in London...
