Portraits of Influential Britons by G F Watts and Simon Frederick

Curator Dr Emily Burns explores the impact of Watts’s celebrated Hall of Fame in conversation with Simon Frederick’s Black is the New Black

Who would you choose to include in a national hall of fame today? Who is worthy of the accolade of being included within this country’s pantheon of greats? And how might your selection differ from what has come before, or indeed others’ opinions today? These are some of the questions which will be posed by the upcoming display Faces of Fame: British Portraits Then and Now opening on 27 September 2022. Featuring loans from the National Portrait Gallery Collection as part of the National Skills Sharing Partnership, this six-month pop-up exhibition within the Historic Gallery spaces will present painted portraits of prominent Victorians from G F Watts’s Hall of Fame series alongside twelve photographic portraits from Simon Frederick’s groundbreaking Black is the New Black project.

G F Watt’s Hall of Fame series recorded the likenesses of his eminent contemporaries and spanned much of his long career, from 1847 to 1901. Watts stated his intention for his portraits to ‘penetrate the mind and grasp the soul’ of his subjects, for viewers to see. The display includes striking pictures of politicians such as the would-have-been Prime Minister Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, the social reformer Charles Booth, and fellow artists including Walter Crane, writers such as Algernon Charles Swinburne, and the musician Sir Charles Hallé.

There is much to applaud, and yet the sitters selected by Watts as part of this ambitious portrait project highlight the artist and his very Victorian values: the portraits are exclusively of white men, but for one woman – the social reformer, Josephine Butler. An unfinished portrait of Florence Nightingale in the Watts collection may have been intended for the series. Noting that his Hall of Fame featured figures who had both ‘made or marred the country’, Watts also painted portraits of figures who today would not be admired or lauded for their positive contribution to British society. Watts Gallery Trust is committed to museum decolonisation, and aims to address the history of our collections and art on display openly and honestly.

Over 100 years later, motivated by the same desire to create portraits of figures the artist deemed deserving of recognition, artist and filmmaker Simon Frederick’s series brings together exceptional figures from the world of politics, business, culture, religion and science to celebrate Black British achievement today. Seeking a way to recognise the immense impact of black individuals on British culture, in 2016 Frederick conducted a BBC Two documentary series on Black culture in modern Britain. As part of the project, he photographed acclaimed sitters ranging from the model Naomi Campbell to the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu and architect Sir David Adjaye.

In this exhibition, juxtaposing both historic and contemporary portraits of leading Britons, visitors will be invited to consider the similarities and differences in both artists’ selection of sitters as well as the overlapping or contrasting themes emerging from the two bodies of work. Both feature prominent artists, writers, medics, and social reformers, and the information accompanying the display will address and tease out these themes.

Ultimately, both these portrait series exemplify the powerful human urge to categorise and create hierarchies within their social structures, to make sense of the world. Yet as the changing reputations of the sitters for Watts’s Hall of Fame indicate, and indeed the ever-shifting celebrity landscape today reveals, fame is a shifting state, while each individual’s actions and achievements speak for themselves.

This display has been created in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery as part of their transformational Inspiring People project which includes an extensive programme of nationwide activities, funded by The National Heritage Lottery Fund and Art Fund.