“. . . explores the enduring legacy of writers across the ages.”
“So many of the works in this show both reveal aspects of authors’ characters and lives, and also conceal things,” co-curator Catharine MacLeod – Senior Curator of Seventeenth-century Collections at the National Portrait Gallery, London – tells me about Writers Revealed. “But the things that are concealed – which in the case of women are often their gender itself – reveal things about the conditions in which people worked, and the societies in which they lived.”
This exhibition – a collaboration between two distinguished British institutions, the National Portrait Gallery, London and the British Library – displays for the first time seventy portraits with over one hundred rare manuscripts and first editions. Spanning the sixteenth century to the present day, it explores the enduring legacy of writers across the ages, featuring such icons as William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, William Blake, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and J R R Tolkien, along with contemporary luminaries Sir Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith.
George Charles Beresford, Virginia Woolf, July 1902, platinum print, 15.2 × 10.8cm. © National Portrait Gallery, London
“We wanted to share the breadth and depth of the collections of these two institutions,” MacLeod says when I ask about the show’s broad historical scope, “and to show that, across 500 years of history, while authors have been writing in very different contexts, they are dealing with issues that have relevance to us all today: issues of identity, freedom of action and expression, the connections between individual lives and wider society.
“Portraits make people from the past more visible – literally! – to us, reminding us of our common humanity, and help us to retrieve overlooked figures, such as the extraordinary Anglo-Caribbean writer Una Marson, as well as celebrating famous figures like Shakespeare.”
Charlotte Brontë, Manuscript for Jane Eyre, 1847, ink on woven paper. Add MS 43476, f. 1r. © British Library, London
MacLeod explains that writers have been at the core of the London gallery from its start: “At the National Portrait Gallery our portraits of authors have always been some of the most popular with visitors, and writers have always been at the heart of the Gallery. The first portrait to enter the collection was the portrait of William Shakespeare, NPG 1.”
As to the power of the collaboration itself, of the unique synergies – indeed, reveals – that come from the collections of two mighty institutions combining for an exhibition of this scale, MacLeod points to an interesting synergy, which involves the eighteenth-century novelist, Frances ‘Fanny’ Burney.
Associated with John Taylor, William Shakespeare, c.1610, oil on canvas, feigned oval, 55.2 × 43.8cm. © National Portrait Gallery, London
“She was a ground-breaking novelist but she published her first novel anonymously, as she was afraid of society’s and her family’s disapproval of her as a woman writer. The British Library has loaned a letter written by her to the publisher and bookseller Thomas Lowndes, asking him if he would consider publishing a book by someone whose identity he could not know. The letter was delivered by her brother, who used a false name to help keep her secret. The book, Evelina, was published anonymously and was a huge success, and Burney’s identity was eventually revealed.
“However, her portrait, painted several years later by her cousin, who had helped her get the book published, shows her simply as a well-to-do woman, wearing a ridiculously large and very fashionable hat; there is no reference to her work. In spite of her success and popularity, she still had to present her public face to society primarily as a woman of fashion, not a writer.” It is just one example of the kinds of reveals and conceals that come when two powerful forms of human expression – art and literature – combine in expertly curated context.
Dr Joseph Brennan is a Lambda Literary Award-nominated author based in Tropical North Queensland.
HOTA Gallery
12 April to 3 August 2025
Queensland
Originally published in print – Art Almanac, April 2025 issue, pp. 24–26
