National Portrait Gallery, London

The most famous painting of Shakespeare!

One place I really loved on my visit to London was the National Portrait Gallery. It really is like stepping back in time and locking eyes of some of the most influential people in history.

​I really liked the room with Tudor portraits. After reading 'Wolf Hall' by Hillary Mantel, it really is interesting to see the portraits from the people from the power grabbing, dangerous world of the Tudor court. There are amazing details in the portraits, many of the portraits of Elizabeth I show symbols of the exploration that was going on at the time, and seeing the portraits of her and her mother, Anne Boleyn, you can see the same canny brown eyes!

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Anne Boleyn.

Elizabeth the first.

Henry VII looks pretty Machiavellian in this portrait!

Catherine Parr - Henry VIII's sixth wife.

An unfinished portrait of Henry VIII

Edward VI - son of Henry VIII who unfortunately died before adulthood.

The rooms containing portraits from the Enlightenment were interesting. Times were really changing, and so much of it was fueled by radical new ideas about equality, liberty the separation of church and state and so on. I made a beeline for the portraits of Mary and Percy Shelley.

Mary Shelley.

Percy Shelley.

Jane Austen.

Charles Darwin.

I had wanted to find see the portrait of Jane Austen, and I had some difficulty in finding it, it is absolutely tiny! At first I couldn't find it in the room it was supposed to be in, and had to get detailed instructions from one of the gallery attendants. It is one of the only images of her, drawn by her sister Cassandra.

There were also the 19th century rooms with all sorts of interesting people, including Charles Darwin!