Collections

In 2009, the National Portrait Gallery ran the Gay Icons exhibition - portraits of inspirational figures, many of them gay, chosen by a panel of some of the most famous LGBT people in the UK today.  Some, although not all of the images were from the gallery's permanent collections - the microsite remains up at http://www.npg.org.uk:8080/gayicons/exhib.htm.

If you are interested in a particular historical figure, you can search for them among the gallery's 160,000 portraits here: http://www.npg.org.uk/collections.php

Gay figures from the 1930s including Lytton Strachey, E M Forster, Virginia Woolf, Maynard Keynes and Radclyffe Hall are well represented in the Collection in paintings and photography. A good proportion of these are on display in Room 31.