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Imagined Lives: Portraits of Unknown People
Around Town: Exhibitions
Also on at National Portrait Gallery
- The Queen: Art and Image, Until Sun Oct 21
- Famous in the Fifties: Photographs by Daniel Farson, Until Sun Sep 16
- Spotlight on Peter Rand: Ten Photographs from the 1960s, Until Sun Sep 16
- The Queen: Art & Image, Until Sun Oct 21
- Road to 2012, Jul 19-Sep 23
- Road to 2012: Aiming High, Jul 19-Sep 23
Events on today
- From Cradle to Crown: Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee Walk,
- Guided Walk in Hampstead,
- John Piper: The Gyselynck Collection, River and Rowing Museum
- Radicals, Religion and Rivers,
- The Total London Experience,
- Oxford, Stratford, the Cotswolds and Warwick Castle,
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False Mary by Alexander McCall Smith, Unknown woman, formerly known as Mary, Queen of Scots (154287) Unknown artist c.1570 - © National Portrait Gallery, London
Time Out says Rate it
This display, originally conceived for and shown at Montacute House in Somerset, looks at portraits of people whose identities are uncertain. Dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the portraits were once thought to depict famous sitters including Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots and the poet and courtier Sir Thomas Overbury. Their identities now lost, disproved or disputed, the portraits have inspired the authors John Banville, Tracy Chevalier, Julian Fellowes, Alexander McCall Smith, Terry Pratchett, Sarah Singleton, Joanna Trollope and Minette Walters to imagine what the lives of the sitters may have been like. Their fictional biographies and character sketches accompany the exhibition, along with the results of recent research undertaken by History of Art students at the University of Bristol.
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Portraits don't have to be stuffy. The National Portrait Gallery has everything from oil paintings of stiff-backed royals to photos of soccer...
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Daily 10am-6pm, Thur & Fri until 9pm. Closed Dec 24-26
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