The Beautiful and the Damned

The foundation of the National Portrait Gallery in 1856 was just one expression of an age that sought to make public what had previously been private.

Between 1860 and 1900 celebrity portraits, together with the vogue for the cartes de visite, fuelled the fashion for collecting and classifying photographs of the face.

These photographs and collections sought to celebrate eminence, intellect, beauty and individualism. This book explores the parallel development of celebrity and surveillance portraiture in relation to the 19th-century belief in physiognomy, the rise of the new science of genetics and the belief system of social Darwinism.