Artists in conversation with boxers; playwrights next to composers; royalty juxtaposed with protestors; pop stars talking to Tudors; abolitionists facing suffragettes; pop jostling with expressionism; collage communicating with painting.
Last week, I went to visit the National Portrait Gallery for the first time since it closed three years ago. As a kid growing up in London, it was one of my favourite places. If I had a spare 30 minutes in town, I’d always go in. It was free and I loved seeing the people who lived and shaped this country – from the early 2000s photographs of Zadie Smith to Maggi Hambling’s portrait of Dorothy Hodgkin, the Nobel-winning British chemist, deep in concentration and depicted with four hands: one holding a magnifying glass, one sketching out molecular structures, one holding a card and one pointing out a sentence in a paper.
