The Portraits of Historians in the National Portrait Gallery

Abstract

The portraits in our national collection may be studied in many different ways. They may be treated as examples of Art, as illustrations of the life of some period of British history or as representations of some particular class of men. It seemed to me that a society composed of students of history might be specially interested in the portraits of historical writers. The men of a particular time have a certain resemblance to each other—there is a family likeness in the faces of the Tudor or the Stuart worthies. Soldiers and sailors, lawyers and divines, even when they belong to different periods, seem to possess some common characteristics in feature and expression which a psychologist could trace and define. But the historical writers seem to have no typical or distinctive traits. Nothing in their looks reveals common interests or common pursuits, except that some of them have a bookish air. No doubt the reason is that many of them were politicians or men of action, not merely writers by profession, and it is to our advantage that it was so.

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