Students from the History and Heritage super curricular club recently visited the National Portrait Gallery in London to take part in their ‘Portraits of Empire’ workshop. Students learned how to analyse a portrait as a primary source, and then visited the Empire and Resistance room in the main galleries to apply these skills. 

Ben, a first year student said: “It was very eye-opening to look at these pictures through the lens of a historical source - prior to this experience I had never considered how much information you can obtain about not only the people in the portrait, but also the prevalent attitudes and ideas of their society. It was helpful to improve my analysis skills and further my understanding of the British Empire - an especially pertinent topic, as its legacy continues to shape not only our country, but also the entire globe.”

Cara, a first year student added: “The workshop was really insightful in showing us how we can use portraits as useful sources when making historical interpretations. Through analysing different portraits in small groups it allowed us to expand our communication skills by enabling us to come up with and share different ideas about the messages of the portraits- this was reinforced later in the workshop where I enjoyed listening to people's different views of the portraits that they studied. I learnt that portraits can offer a lot more information by analysing them in more detail than just reading from the labels provided.”