“It is not always easy to grasp what Britain’s National Portrait Gallery is for. Is it about fame or the art of portraiture? And, if the former, how to differentiate it from Madame Tussaud’s or a historical [celebrity magazine]? … It was on a different wave of self-confidence that Lords Stanhope, Ellesmere and the others floated the idea of a National Portrait Gallery 150 years ago. They wanted a gallery that would reflect the Whig view of history, a parade of personalities who could fairly be seen as the cultural and political ancestors of what had only recently become an administratively centralised world empire. What they got, and we have still got, is rather different: a gallery that shows art in the service of human individuality.”