The Amazing Face

The portrait is one of the most enduring aspects of Western art. For more than two thousand years artists have created recognisable images of specific people. Those images and the stories of their subjects’ lives continue to fascinate us to this day.

This selection of almost seventy art works is drawn from the rich and varied collections of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. The portraits here span almost four and a half centuries, from Ridolfo Ghirlandaio’s Man with a Rose, probably dating from the mid-sixteenth century, to late twentieth-century photographs. Through them, this exhibition traces some of the major trends and changes in portraiture over more than four hundred years and examines a few curiosities along the way.