National Portrait Gallery given 130 original prints of stars including Bowie and Barbara Hepworth

 
Donation: Photos of David Bowie (left) and Nell Dunn taken by Lord Snowdon

Lord Snowdon has given the National Portrait Gallery an archive of 130 original prints of stars from Maggie Smith to Laurence Olivier.

The gift is the third set of works he has donated since 2000 and includes studio portraits from the 1950s to the 1990s as well as pictures of figures such as Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore from Private View, an examination of the British art world created in 1965 with Bryan Robertson, then director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, and the art critic John Russell.

Highlights from the new donation will go on show this autumn including portraits of John Hurt, Alan Bates and Julie Christie as well as writers Agatha Christie, Kingsley Amis, Graham Greene and Nell Dunn, author of Up the Junction and Poor Cow, and musicians and dancers from Yehudi Menuhin to Margot Fonteyn.

The archive also includes a selection of portraits of the royal family. Lord Snowdon, now 84, married Princess Margaret, the queen’s sister, in 1960. They were divorced in 1978.

Donation: Vita Sackville-West taken by Lord Snowdon

Sandy Nairne, the National Portrait Gallery’s director, said they were “delighted” at the further gift of prints. “These are wonderful portrait images of some of the most creative and engaging contributors to Britain in the second half of the 20th century.”

Lord Snowdon, then Antony Armstrong-Jones, began his career in the early 1950s focusing on theatre, fashion and society and beginning a long association with British Vogue. After his marriage to Princess Margaret, which was the first globally televised wedding, he expanded into documentary subjects including mental health and loneliness.

Snowdon: A Life in View will run from September 26 to June 21 2015, admission free.

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