The NPG has always been devoted to real lives reflected through art, rather than art for art’s sake. In this sense it is a museum constitutionally designed to accord with the sentiments of Samuel Johnson, who said that he would rather look at a portrait of a dog that he knew than all the painted allegories in the world. When the NPG was founded in 1856, Lord Palmerston, Prime Minister of the day, declared that its principal aim was to set before the eyes of the general public a gallery of the great and the good, as a spur to communal emulation: “There cannot be a greater incentive to mental exertion, to noble actions, to good conduct on the part of the living than for them to see before them the features of those who have done things which are worthy of our admiration … in the visible and tangible shape of portraits.” But over the past century and a half the museum’s collecting habits have become rather more liberal, morally speaking, than they were in the Victorian period. It has metamorphosed from a gallery of commendable individuals into a kind of human zoo, overflowing with fascinatingly exotic examples of the species.

The NPG’s latest exhibition, “Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers”, is a case in point. Modest in size but entertainingly wide in scope, it is drawn almost exclusively from the NPG’s own collections. Its subject is simply women who have travelled, starting with Aphra Benn, author of Oroonoko, the fictional account of a wrongfully enslaved African prince, inspired by the author’s journey to Surinam in the 1660s; and concluding with much more recent lady travellers such as the novelist Agatha Christie (1890-1976) or the distinguished archaeologist Dame Kathleen Kenyon (1906-78). The pictures in the...

To read the full article please either login or register .