National Portrait Gallery Picture Library
The National Portrait Gallery Picture Library is the image licensing service of the National Portrait Gallery in London, providing professional access to the most extensive collection of portraits in the world. The Gallery, founded in 1856, holds more than 350,000 works spanning from the sixteenth century to the present day, and its Picture Library makes around 160,000 of those portraits available to license and download directly through its website, with new images added regularly. For publishers, broadcasters, film makers, advertisers and researchers, it is the authorised route to reproduce portraits of the people who have made — and are making — British history and culture, from Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn to David Bowie, Audrey Hepburn and Dame Kelly Holmes.
The Gallery behind the library
The National Portrait Gallery was founded in 1856 to encourage, through portraiture, the appreciation and understanding of the people who have made and are making British history and culture. Today it conserves, grows and shares the world's largest collection of portraits, promoting engagement with portraiture in all media to a wide public. The collection's focus is biographical rather than purely artistic: the sitter matters as much as the artist, and the roll of sitters runs from kings and queens, artists and authors to musicians, actors, scientists and politicians. The collection is diverse and ever-growing, with recent commissions such as Shirin Neshat's portrait of Malala Yousafzai reflecting contemporary Britain.
The Gallery is a charity, and that status shapes the Picture Library's purpose. Income from licensing supports the Gallery's work: conservation and care of the national collection, upkeep of its historic London building, free access for the public to its portraits, and its work with children and young people, including those with disabilities and special educational needs. The Gallery has said that it must self-generate over 70 per cent of the funds needed to sustain its activities, which makes image licensing a genuinely important revenue stream rather than a side operation.
What the Picture Library offers
The Picture Library provides access to around 160,000 portraits that can be licensed and downloaded directly from the Gallery's images website, at npgimages.com, and the stock continues to grow as more of the 350,000-work collection is digitised and published. The Picture Library team — part of the Gallery's Rights and Images function — handles requests for reproduction of collection portraits for editorial, advertising, broadcast and publication use, and the team can be contacted directly for help in finding the right images for a project. That advisory role matters in a collection of this size: a picture researcher who knows the holdings can suggest the strongest portrait of a sitter, an unusual sitting, or a work whose rights position is straightforward.
Access is deliberately practical. Images can be licensed for reproduction through the Picture Library's own website, or by contacting the Picture Library team directly to discuss a project. The team presents itself as available to discuss a client's needs and to assist in finding the right images, rather than leaving researchers to navigate a collection of this scale alone. New images continue to be added regularly, so the searchable library grows steadily toward the full extent of the Gallery's holdings, and repeat users — publishers working through a multi-volume history, for example, or a broadcaster making a documentary series — can build on earlier searches as fresh portraits come online.
Collections represented beyond the Gallery
The library's reach extends beyond the Gallery's own walls. It also represents and licenses significant works from other institutions and archives, including the National Trust's portraiture collection and the Jane Bown archive — Bown being one of the most celebrated British portrait photographers of the twentieth century. In addition, the Gallery owns archive collections and acts as copyright agent for a number of artist estates, providing licences for the reproduction of artistic works by photographers including Ida Kar, Dorothy Wilding, Howard Coster, Harry Diamond and the Yevonde Colour Archive, among many more. For a client, that representation work simplifies life: a single negotiation with the Picture Library can clear both a Gallery portrait and an estate-controlled photograph.
The Gallery has also worked with DACS, the Design and Artists Copyright Society, to make its images readily available for licensing through DACS Images, widening the routes by which publishers can clear its portraits.
Commercial licensing
For professional and commercial use, the Gallery offers a commercial licence covering use in books, magazines, films, television, consumer products, exhibition prints and displays, and any commercial or promotional activity. Commercial licence images are supplied at professional specification — at least 2,400 pixels wide at 300 dpi. Prices depend on how and where the images are to be used, and clients register for an account and use an online licence selector to see prices, license and download images. The Rights and Images team also answers questions about images of the portraits and their use in commercial projects, as well as filming and photography shoots at the Gallery and product or brand licensing — a reminder that the library's work now spans merchandise and brand partnerships as well as publishing.
Free non-commercial licensing
Uniquely among major picture libraries, the Gallery pairs its commercial operation with a free non-commercial licence. Images under this licence are supplied at 1,500 pixels wide at 300 dpi and may be used for non-commercial research and private study, teaching in a classroom, dissertations, and free-to-access print or online publications. The non-commercial licence is free of charge; users register for an account to access the various free licences available. This two-tier model reflects the Gallery's founding mission: the national collection belongs to the public for learning, while commercial exploitation of its images contributes to the cost of keeping that access free.
Brand licensing and the wider rights business
Beyond image reproduction, the National Portrait Gallery has developed its brand as a licensable property. TSBA Group has been appointed the Gallery's global licensing agent, with plans to build partnerships across retailers and brand collaborations in categories including homeware, gifting, stationery, apparel and accessories, following TSBA's work taking the British Museum to the global licensing stage. The programme takes inspiration from the collection's paintings and photography, with initial themes including kings and queens and the fabrics and fashions of the Tudor portraits. Revenues from such programmes are invested back into the Gallery's curatorial and educational work and into conserving and maintaining the collection — the commercial and charitable purposes of the rights business reinforcing one another.
Who uses the Picture Library
The library's users are the professional image buyers of the media and publishing industries — picture editors on newspapers and magazines, book publishers illustrating biographies and histories, television and film producers who need an authoritative likeness of a historical figure, exhibition designers, and commercial brands — together with the teachers, students and independent researchers served by the free licence. Its membership of BAPLA, the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies, places it within the professional community of UK image suppliers. In a market where a search engine can find a portrait in seconds but cannot tell you whether you may legally publish it, the Picture Library's combination of authoritative holdings, clear rights and estate representation is its core value.
The Picture Library's place in British media
In the directory of UK news and media agencies, the National Portrait Gallery Picture Library occupies a distinctive position: a picture library attached not to a news organisation but to a national museum, licensing the definitive visual record of British public life across six centuries. The Tudor portraits that anchor school textbooks, the photographic sittings that define twentieth-century celebrity, and contemporary commissions that record Britain as it changes are all administered through the same Rights and Images operation. Every licence sold supports a charity that keeps the underlying collection free for everyone to visit — a model in which the commercial media's need for images directly funds public access to the nation's family album.
