France. Why is there no National Portrait Gallery in France? The question was asked by Franco-British photographer Ed Alcock, winner of the 2025 Niépce Prize, during an interview a few days after receiving his distinction. A few years earlier, the photographer Martin Parr had already noted this absence during the presentation of his exhibition “Only Human” at the National Portrait Gallery, but without providing any answers. This situation raises all the more questions since the museum founded in London in 1856 was taken over first in Scotland in Edinburgh in 1889, then in the United States in Washington in 1968, and finally in Australia in Canberra in 1998. Does this mean that this type of institution would be an Anglo-Saxon specificity? Everything suggests this because elsewhere, particularly on the European continent, this type of museum designed to bring together portraits of the men and women who have shaped and continue to shape local history and culture, has not sparked any revival.
“There was talk of creating a national portrait gallery in Berlin. It never materialized.”underlines Krzysztof Pomian, author of the trilogy The Museum, a world history, published by Gallimard. However, as the historian, philosopher and essayist points out: “ Compared to the Pantheon in France, Westminster in Great Britain and Walhalla in Germany, three monuments where the memory of “Great Men” is eternalized, the National Portrait Gallery has innovated since its inauguration in several respects. It is a secular place which is neither a temple, like Westminster or Walhalla, nor a cemetery made sacred by the presence of the dead, like the Pantheon, but a museum which its name links to the National Gallery and which places the “Great Men” in history, and not in a timeless glory. » The fact remains that its creation did not provoke a desire among anyone in France in the 19th century to reproduce the London model, and neither in the 20th century nor at the start of the 21st. And this for two reasons: the first is due to the specific history of each country, the second, to the consideration of the portrait.
The Pantheon, Versailles took the place
The first reason results from the turbulent historical discontinuity that France experienced during the 19th and early 20th centuries, unlike the United Kingdom. Each republican, monarchical or Napoleonic period generated projects, creations and reconfigurations of places or spaces whose ambition was more to constitute a museum of the History of France than to bring together the personalities who made the nation. For this, there is the Pantheon, born from the decision taken in 1791 by the National Constituent Assembly to reconvert the Sainte-Geneviève church to house their graves. At the beginning of the 19th century, Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère, known as Quatremère de Quincy (1755-1849), archaeologist, art theorist and politician, nevertheless proposed“to install at the Louvre, alongside the old masters, a modern collection devoted to the history of France and its great men, recalls Krzysztof Pomian. This project brought new relevance to the theme of a museum of French History, illustrated by works of art, introduced by the Count of Angiviller, sponsor of effigies for the Louvre of illustrious men. The Louvre did not want to go down this path. It will be in Versailles that it will be realized with the decision of Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, in 1833, to make the Château a dedicated museum “to all the glories of France” and at the same time to breathe new life into the building, abandoned since the Revolution and in a deplorable state. It was then a question of uniting the energies behind the July Monarchy which came up against the opposition of the legitimists who wanted the return of the Bourbons, but also that of the Bonapartists, the Republicans and the Socialists.
Located in the South wing of the Château and opened to the public in 1837, the galleries have as their flagship the immense Battles gallery with its paintings recounting French military successes from Clovis to Napoleon. Elsewhere, a multitude of portraits. And “with a few exceptions, only military and monarchical glories; the sciences and letters were not celebrated there, the arts themselves only had the mission of showing the great men and the great events of national history. notes Krzysztof Pomian. It also includes pictorial masterpieces by Rigaud, David, Girodet and Delacroix. “ A large number of people came at the beginning. It then became rarer, after the abdication of Louis-Philippe in 1848.specifies Laurent Salomé, director of the Versailles Museum. “ The vast restoration and rehabilitation project of the estate and the royal residence undertaken from 1892 by Pierre de Nolhac (editor’s note: curator of the Palace of Versailles Museum between 1892 and 1920) will remove a large part of Louis-Philippe’s historic galleries to recreate apartments, marking the start of the great undertaking of refurnishing the castle. »
Across the Channel, the Museum of French History in Versailles hardly inspires. When in 1846, Count Philip Stanhope (1805-1875), English politician and writer, proposed to the House of Commons the idea of a National Portrait Gallery, he in no way referred to the Louis-Philippe Museum. His proposal to“a gallery of portraits of the most eminent figures in British history and culture” is part of the slow and difficult democratization of a country in full modernity, with the flourishing colonial empire whose history it is a question of telling as much monarchical, political and economic as the history of ideas, sciences, arts and sensibilities, past, but also current. In other words, developing the history of the United Kingdom from the Tudor period to the contemporary period, only through portraiture.
“This exclusive choice of the portrait to tell it is due to the preponderant place that the portrait has in painting and English society in the same way as landscape and nature, explains Frédéric Ogée, professor of literature and British art history at Paris Cité University and the École du Louvre. In France, on the contrary, the consideration of the portrait is less. Which may also explain the absence of a national portrait museum. »
Portraiture, a second-rate art in France
“France has an ambiguous relationship with the art of portraiture, notes art historian Nadeige Laneyrie-Dagen, professor emeritus at the École normale supérieure. The Academy of Fine Arts, created in the 17the century, established a hierarchy of genres, and in this hierarchy, the portrait comes in second position after history painting, the noblest of the genres. The rules it has laid down are also very strict. » In the UK, not at all. “Because at the end of the 17th century e century, Great Britain is the only European country not to have an Academy or school of painting. She will appear in the 18the, explains Frédéric Ogée. The English wondered a lot about how they could bring about a school different from those existing on the continent, he continues. To this end, they exploited the genre of the portrait, and then that of the landscape, which revolutionized European painting because the landscape was put at the service of the representation of nature, and the portrait to that of human nature. For them, knowledge comes from the observation of nature, a conception itself stemming from the heritage of Newton and Hook. From 1720-1730, portraiture was not just the prerogative of a wealthy elite, unlike in France. Thus orders a whole group of people who have no title of nobility, but who are successful in their profession and who play an important role in British modernity and in the deployment of the British colonial empire. The houses are filled with portraits. »
