This exhibition, guest curated by Peter Ireland, consists of images from the Museum’s collection augmented by loans from across the local community. The main aim is to trace the tradition of portraiture from c.6000 BCE to the present. The many works in the exhibition will be divided into three sections: Origins, The Tradition and Contemporary Developments.

Origins will consist mainly of images as reproductions both on the walls and in adjacent vitrines. The Tradition illuminates the standard forms of portraiture from the 17th century, tracing particularly on the huge impact of photography on portrayal from the middle of the 19th century. Contemporary Developments closes the show with examples illustrating the discussion around the nature of portraiture beginning in the 1980s.

We now regard likeness to be the essential quality of a successful portrait, but this is only a relatively recent expectation – in the Western tradition it goes back only about 500 years – and in other traditions, such as the Polynesian, it’s more recent, influenced by the Western tradition over the past 200 years. Earlier portraiture was essentially symbolic, illustrating the subject’s status, political or religious, rather than what they may have actually looked like.