National Portrait Gallery

About

The moment the door is pushed open, a complex, still air that has held people's faces for a long time envelops you. Among the portraits lining the walls, Shakespeare's Chandos portrait still gazes outward with an unknowable expression, letting one guess at the weight of the era reflected in his eyes. The self-portraits of Hogarth and Reynolds face the viewer with the bearing of men looking at themselves. Each of their expressions is borne up, indifferent and unchanging through the passage of time, and the weight of life held within them is not lessened even in the faint light. This space does not merely display faces; it is a space into which the lives of these figures have seeped all at once.