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Icons and Identities explores the portrayal of people as a human preoccupation from prehistoric art to digital media. Featuring internationally recognised sitters, it shows how artists in the western tradition have engaged with this fascination and made artworks with a remarkable diversity of form and function.

The National Portrait Gallery's collections hold numerous portraits of creative partnerships. This book looks at the extensive collection of the Gallery and explores the role of love and the people featured both as sitters and artists. Drawing on recent scholarship, the exhibition will explore changing ideas of love, and give readers the opportunity to discover love stories both tragic and transcendent. The stories cover a variety of topics, including: the role of the muse, featuring stories such as George Romney, Lady Emma Hamilton and Nelson, and the Bloomsbury group; scandal and tragedy, exploring the relationships of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono; literary love, highlighting the tales of Mary and Percy Shelley, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes; a shared studio, featuring the stories of artists Lee Miller and Man Ray, and Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson; and love and the lens, which explores the stories of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, and Mick and Bianca Jagger. Love Stories will be brought to life through the perspective of various authors, using material from the sitter's own letters, diaries and poetry, while highlighting their connection and influence on some of the greatest masterpieces of art.

Accompanying a National Portrait Gallery exhibition, a closer look at the portraiture with the 'Bright Young Things' as subject, captured by photographer Cecil Beaton.

The National Portrait Gallery, London, holdsa largecollection of portraits featuringsitters who have played an important role in British history and culture across the periods, manyof whichhave also made significant contributions as writers. Featured writers include:Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley, William Shakespeare, George Eliot, Zadie Smith, Oscar Wilde,John Ruskin,Monica Ali, Stephen Hawking, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Syliva Plath, Harold Pinter, Jean Rhys, Kazuo Ishiguro, Roald Dahl,Stuart Hall, Carol Ann Duffy, Malala Yousafzai, Charles Darwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Bront¿nd Samuel Pepy.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries there was one art form in which English artists excelled above all their continental European counterparts: the painting of miniatures. This fascinating book explores the genre with special reference to two of its most accomplished practitioners, Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, whose astounding skill brought them international fame and admiration. Four centuries ago, England was famous primarily for its literary culture ¿ the dram a of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and the works of the great lyrical and metaphysical poets. When it came to the production of visual art, the country was seen as something of a backwater. However, there was one art form for which English artists of this period were renowned: portrait miniature painting, or as it was known at the time, limning. Growing from roots in manuscript illumination, it was brought to astonishing heights of skill by two artists in particular: Nicholas Hilliard (1547¿1619) and Isaac Oliver (c .1565¿1617). In addition to exhibiting the exquisite technique of the artists, portrait miniatures express in a unique way many of the most distinctive and fascinating aspects of court life in this period: ostentatious secrecy, games of courtly love, arcane symbolism, a love of intricacy and decoration. Bedecked in elaborate lace, encrusted in jewellery and sprinkled with flowers, court ladies smile enigmatically at the viewer; their male counterparts rest on grassy banks or lean against trees, sighing over thwarted love, or more modestly express their hopes in Latin epigrams inscribed around their heads. Often set in richly enamelled and jewelled gold lockets, or beautifully turned ivory or ebony boxes, such miniatures could be concealed or revealed, exchanged or kept, as part of elaborate processes of friendship, love, patronage and diplomacy at the courts of Elizabeth I and James I /VI. This richly illustrated book, like the exhibition it accompanies, explores what the portrait miniature reveals about identity, society and visual culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

Oscar Rejlander, Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll and Clementina Hawarden embody the very best of Victorian photographyThe work of Oscar Rejlander (1813-75), Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79), Lewis Carroll (1832-98) and Lady Clementina Hawarden (1822-65) embodies the very best of photography from the Victorian era. These giants of 19th-century photography experimented with new approaches to picture-making and shaped attitudes toward photography that have informed artistic practice ever since. Discover the images that made the case for the photograph as a work of art in this beautiful book.These four artists--a Swedish émigré with a mysterious past, a middle-aged Ceylonese expatriate, an Oxford academic and writer of fantasy literature, and a Scottish countess--formed the unlikeliest of schools. Both Carroll and Cameron studied under Rejlander briefly, and maintained a lasting association based around intersecting approaches to portraiture and narrative. Influenced by historical painting and working in close association with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, they formed a bridge between the art of the past and the art of the future.In her foreword to this volume, the Duchess of Cambridge writes: "photographs of children in particular, which feature predominately in the exhibition, are of real interest to me ... these photographs allow us to reflect on the importance of preserving and appreciating childhood while it lasts."

Starting with the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867, at which a distinct Russian school of painting was recognised, this title examines developments in theatre and music, the rising Realist aesthetic and the powerful voices of wealthy patrons from the worlds of industry and commerce, such as Pavel Tretyakov.