Elizabeth Goldring

‘The Ambassadors’ (1533)

On any day​ of the week, you will find a sizeable crowd at the National Gallery standing in front of the painting now known as The Ambassadors: Hans Holbein’s life-sized double portrait of 1533 depicting Jean de Dinteville, the French ambassador in England, and his friend and fellow humanist Georges de Selve, bishop of Lavaur, who passed through...

Like​ the Wallace Collection in London, the Frick began life as a family house. In 1915, Henry Clay Frick bequeathed his Beaux-Arts limestone mansion on Fifth Avenue, along with its contents, to the city of New York. The Frick opened to the public as a museum in 1935, sixteen years after Frick’s death at the age of 69, and four years after that of his wife, Adelaide, at the age of 71....

In​ 2004, Compton Verney, the Warwickshire seat of the Verney family for nearly six hundred years, opened to the public as an art gallery. British portraits, in a variety of media, are central to the museum’s collection, but over the past ten years or so, Compton Verney has become a destination for a very particular type of portrait: the miniature, which flourished in Britain from the...

In​ 1925, Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st earl of Iveagh, purchased Kenwood House, a neoclassical villa on the edge of Hampstead Heath and one of the finest surviving examples of the mature designs of Robert Adam. Two years later, Lord Iveagh died, bequeathing Kenwood to the nation, along with 63 Old Master and 18th-century British paintings from his own collection, including works by Rembrandt,...