National Portrait Gallery

As it happened this year , I spent Christmas in London. Apart from eating and other festivities I found some time to visit the National Portrait Gallery. It is a host to a vast collection of paintings and photographs of  the famous and also less known Britons from the fourteenth century up to the present day, who contributed to British and world’s culture, science and politics. Among them hangs a portrait of John Donne. It was acquired by the NPG in 2006 from a private collection where it had resided for over four hundred years. The NPG is now trying to raise funds to conserve the painting and to revers it to its the original form. The research that was carried over when the portrait was bought, showed that, under the layers of paint added throughout the centuries, the original face of Donne was slightly different from how it looks now.; the lips and the left eye were painted over and raised. Currently, John Donne’s portrait must remain unchanged and it can be seen in the Tudor Gallery, among the other well-known faces of the Elizabethan court. I hope that it soon will be restored to its former glory.