A selection of portraits from 1485 to 1603, many of which are on display at the Gallery or at Montacute House, our regional partner in Somerset. Portraits below are listed in chronological order.

Press tickets for temporary exhibitions can be arranged in advance by contacting the press office or requested on site at the welcome desk by presenting a valid press card. Please note that press ...

Photographer Zoë Law’s Legends series celebrates over one hundred individuals from the worlds of art, fashion, business and entertainment. From World Cup-winning footballer, Sir Bobby Charlton, to the ...

Father of Howard Carter. Carter was an artist who specialised in animal and sporting paintings and exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions. He trained Howard in the skills of ...

Italian-born Belzoni moved to England in 1803 where he found work for a time as a strongman, actor and conjuror at fairs and theatres around the country. He travelled to Egypt having persuaded Mehmet ...

As a child, Dr Crotch, the musician and composer, was known as 'the musical phenomenon of Norwich'. He began his professional career as organist of Christ Church, Oxford, at the age of fifteen, and ...

Born in Virginia, at the time a colony of Britain, Washington was the son of a planter. Despite a formal education lasting only a few years, he taught himself planting and land surveying by reading ...

At sixteen, Campbell ran away from his home in Scotland and joined a ship heading for the West Indies. He joined the Army and by 1800 had become a brigade major on the island of St Vincent. The ...

Sir William Reynolds-Stephens was a sculptor, decorative artist and painter. Born of British parents, he was educated in Germany and England and then at the Royal Academy Schools in London from 1884 ...

After his Grand Tour, Robert Adam set up in London as an architect in 1758 with his younger brothers. For the next thirty years his neo-classical designs, his en-suite planning, and his attention to ...

Born between 1003 and 1005, the son of King Ethelred II the Unready and Emma, daughter of Richard II of Normandy, he became King in 1043. For the first eleven years of his reign the real ruler of ...

Harold reigned following the death of his brother-in- law Edward 'the confessor'. He was defeated at the battle of Hastings in 1066 which marked the end of Anglo-saxon rule.