The National Portrait Gallery reopens with a fabulous transformation

In the National Portrait Gallery’s oldest painting, a diminutive Henry VII by an anonymous artist gazes out astutely from the safety of an alcove. In its latest, Michael Armitage’s “John Barry, O Kelly, Sonny and Richard Moore”, four Hackney dustmen work through lockdown. Rendered in a tapestry version from 2022 in delirious colours, rainbow-draped, they surf on a maroon sea of rubbish, a patient on a stretcher above, a pair of masks, one grinning, one doleful, below — life’s tragicomedy. They are the first faces you meet on entering the new NPG, fabulously transformed following a three-year closure.

Director Nicholas Cullinan’s aim is to create “a living portrait of Britain” inside the nation’s most inescapably Victorian museum, he says as we walk through the building ahead of its reopening. The NPG had come to be perceived, he admits, as “old and dusty, dark and boxed in”. Rather than modernise, he embraced “the integrity of the building”, restoring its intricate 19th-century glory. It is spectacular: the graceful stone facade, patterned marble floors and decorative glass gleam; galleries have been opened up to form splendid enfilades punctuated by ornamental arches.

With walls repainted “atomic red” and brilliant green (“we wanted to turn it up a bit”), the museum is enlivened but remains faithful to its original ideal, to house a parade of humanity and individual characters — the opposite of the hermetic white cube of abstraction. Huge windows, most previously boarded up, bathe the place in natural light. Leaves flutter against a high glass pane; beneath it Oscar Wilde, lounging in silk and velvet, languidly appropriates the real-life backdrop. Audrey Hepburn glances at the street from the delicious rotunda café. Everywhere broad vistas pull teeming London into interiors intended to “show Britain in its diversity and complexity — there’s room for everyone”.

From the bright new entrance by Orange Street, you plunge into contemporary life — cultural royalty alongside refuse collectors. “Tom Shakespeare, Intellect with Wheels”, Lucy Jones’s fizzing fuchsia and turquoise portrait of the bioethicist and disability campaigner in his wheelchair, rolls up, vigorous and cheerful. Alex Katz’s “Anna Wintour”, Vogue editor, is sun-bright, minimalist cool. In Peter Blake’s warm, comic portrayal, Glastonbury Festival founder Michael Eavis, aged 86, stands in denim shorts and stretches his arms out in greeting.

Current portraiture seldom looks this vibrant in range and quality — these painters are at the top of their game. Their opening presence lifts the very texture of the NPG, created in 1856 with the mission to acquire pictures “for the celebrity of the person represented rather than the merit of the artist”. The Victorian purpose was to showcase lives worthy of emulation — a bricks-and-mortar equivalent of On Heroes, the manifesto for biography by Thomas Carlyle, instrumental in the gallery’s founding.

Unsurprisingly, its collection is a mishmash. Its first purchase was the sole surviving representation of Shakespeare. Such things — the only portrait, fragile, damaged, amateurish, of the three Brontës; Nicholas Hilliard’s miniature of dashing Walter Raleigh in a sea of lace — are iconic and beloved for their rarity alone, conjuring an age, a place. There are a handful of modern masterpieces — Patrick Heron’s “TS Eliot”, face as fractured as the broken diction of “The Waste Land”; a brutal, almost sinister Lucian Freud self-portrait. Much between is formulaic, dutiful, bland.

How to refresh and renew this historic collection? Cullinan arrived in 2015, an experienced contemporary curator at the Met and Tate, dreaming whom he would invite “if I could commission any artist to portray any subject”. He asked Shirin Neshat to depict Malala Yousafzai, and the Iranian photographer’s stark black-and-white image (2018) of the Pakistan-born, Birmingham-based Nobel Peace Prize laureate — frontal stare, face inscribed with a poem in Arab calligraphy, crystalline composition balancing empathy and distance — is a gripping encounter between two exiles from Islamic extremism, who each nuance struggles of their feminism versus Islam.

It now hangs dramatically opposite conceptualist photographer Thomas Struth’s “Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and Queen Elizabeth II” (2011) in a darkly receding Windsor Castle drawing room — a tour de force of familiarity yet remoteness — and Raqib Shaw’s poignant, poetic painting “The Final Submission in Fire and Ice” (2021-22). Set in a stylised snowy Himalayas of Shaw’s childhood, this self-portrait in a gorgeous Kashmiri coat bursting into flames encapsulates loss, displacement, clinging to memory — as experienced by many exiles and refugees who call Britain home.

The NPG’s unique strength, its “dual interest in biography and art”, allows, says Cullinan, “a constantly evolving picture of the nation, of who we choose to remember”. Nearly half the post-1900 subjects are women. Centre stage in the Victorian gallery is Sarah Forbes Bonetta, Queen Victoria’s protégée, a slave born Omoba Aina; her photograph as a determined though wary young bride is today “one of the most searched pictures in the collection”.

Most transforming is the trophy acquisition in the largest, 18th-century gallery. Joshua Reynolds’ life-size “Mai”, Britain’s first visitor from Tahiti posed as Apollo Belvedere, sinuous and sensuous in white robes and shimmery turban, barefoot, hands tattooed, illuminates the entire room of conventional Georgian grandees — scintillating, dynamic, original.

“Artistically it’s the most important painting we have,” Cullinan says. He lingers on refined details — lavish brushwork on Mai’s costume, background rush of clouds. “We have paintings which are significant historical documents that aren’t masterpieces, and we have other works which are great paintings — Mai is both. He is the first non-white sitter in Georgian London who has nothing to do with slavery. This is a story of agency.”

Mai met Captain Cook in Tahiti and accompanied him back to London, seeking adventure, hoping to win help for Raiatea, his native island. Handsome, gracious, smart, he was the toast of Georgian society and is so again here. But the quality of the painting makes it more than that — although Mai is depicted through the western lens of “noble savage”, his story, his appearance, his difference inspired Reynolds to paint his single best work. Mai symbolises how British culture has been enriched by fusion with foreign people, ideas, energies.

A National Portrait Gallery, Cullinan says, “is a very British way of thinking — rather than the grand French vision at Versailles of generals and leaders. It’s humble, this idea that individual lives amount together to something bigger.”

It’s also undidactic. It seems to me that Cullinan has squared a circle, dovetailing stories of nationhood with serious art. A few lovely focused displays on different media — miniatures, death masks, sculptural busts — draw attention to portraiture’s formal concerns; otherwise chronology is straightforward. Galleries flow easily. Captions are neutral. When I ask about political pressures, which dog other museums, he waves away the question. “That’s a distraction, a transient thing. We’re doing this for the next generations — to get the gallery into the best shape for the next 25 years.”

Reopens June 22, npg.org.uk