National Portrait Galleries

I decided to go exploring this morning and got off the tube at Leicester Square (in Central London, north of the river) and stumbled across the National Portrait Galleries. The National Portrait Galleries is a free museum attached to The National Gallery that has the largest collection of portraits in the world dating back from 1505 all the way to the present day. The gallery is arranged in chronological order so you can literally walk through British political history. Of the over 1,000 portraits, some that I thought were the coolest were:

• a Shakespeare engraving taken from either the Second or Third Folio (1632 or 1663). This engraving is image of Shakespeare that you would have seen if you've ever a picture of him.
• an oil painting of Paul McCartney done by one of his brothers friends, Sam Walsh, called Mike's Brother (1964).
• really cracked oil paintings of both Emily Bronte and the Bronte sisters
• Andy Warhol's portraits Queen Elizabeth II. He painted four identical images of the Queen, all in different abstract colors, which was very interesting.
• A room of drawings of Lady Jane Grey, which I found very interesting just because of her story. She was part of a plot in 1553 to keep England Protestant and was queen for only nine days. No portrait of her was done in her lifetime, so all the drawings/paintings that exist were done after her execution in 1554.
• There was this room filled with a collection of paintings called the "Kit Cat Club" portraits which was apparently the most influential club of the day in England. The Kit Cat Club was very pro parliament, pro protestantism and against the monarchy, and in 1725 one member, Sir Godfrey Kneller painted 44 portraits of the clubs members.
• Other notables: Jonathan Swift, Thomas Hobbes, Brian Eno from Roxy Music (who I may be seeing July 17) and a collection of portraits by the American painter Alex Katz

The size of the gallery makes it just right for my attention span (I spent 2 hours there). Even though I'm not really all that into art museums, I really enjoyed walking though here because I was looking at all these people who I had studied in history. The galleries are right by Trafalgar Square, so its a very easy place to just pop into. All and all, definitely a cool place to walk through.