“The art of the portrait is a noble, beautiful enterprise that amazingly, and to this day in the work of Lucian Freud, David Hockney or Gerhard Richter, mediates the down-to-earth, very human desire to record faces with a philosophical enquiry into the nature of the self. The portrait is at the heart of European high culture – but you won’t even glimpse the rudiments of a history of the portrait as art in the NPG. This museum is not about art. It’s about famous Brits down the ages.”