National Portrait Society

Founded in 19110 by Sir Gerald Kelly along with Glyn Philpot, Ambrose McEvoy, Gerald Moira and Sir William Nicholson. Portrait sculptor members including Sir Jacob Epstein also exhibited along with painters Alvaro Guevara, Walter Sickert, Oswald Birley and Australian painter Kathleen Laetitia O'Connor (1876-1968).

Its inaugural exhibition was held at the Cartwright Memorial Hall, Bradford from July-September in that year. The Society’s main exhibition venue appears to have been the Grosvenor Gallery in London’s Bond Street until 1921 when it changed to the Grafton Galleries. Louis Ginnett was for a time President of this short-lived society that appears to have held only a few exhibitions, the last being possibly in 1921. It is sometimes called the Modern Portrait Society. Early members included Max Beerbohm, Thomas Austen Brown, anglophile Jacques Emile Blanche, Augustus John, David Muirhead, William Nicholson, William Rothenstein, Walter Westley Russell and Wilson Steer. In 1921 their tenth exhibition was held at the Grafton Galleries which opened in January when Alfred Munnings was one of the exhibitors and in January 1922 another exhibition was held at the Grafton Galleries which seems to have been their last probably due to the Grafton Galleries being no longer available for exhibitions. Augustus Edwin John was President of this short-lived society in 1922 and 1923 but no exhibitions have been noted for 1923 when it was recorded that the National Portrait Society 'had no gallery of their own'. Members are noted well into the 1930s and in April 1930 Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield had 'a third exhibition of works loaned by the National Portrait Society.