The National Portrait Gallery is a hybrid, a mongrel, a compromise – part Prado, part Madame Tussauds, a place to admire art and gawp at famous names. It’s a combination that might deprive it of the highest levels of grandeur, but grants some freedoms. The gallery can speak to audiences that are attracted by the personalities on show, and by appreciation of painting and sculpture. Its mixed-up nature allows it to be more relaxed and less reverential than pure temples of art.
Its building, which first opened in 1896, is also a compromise, glommed as it is on to the back of the National Gallery, an institution with which it used to have a fractious sibling rivalry, filling in odd spaces in their shared block. Its L-shaped plan is an expedient add-on, like the sort of big air ducts you see strapped to the roofs of kebab houses, even as it makes an outward show of classical dignity and symmetry. It is a grand piece of cultural plumbing.
