Elizabeth Peyton Portrait of Nicholas Cullinan Joins the National Portrait Gallery Collection
A new portrait by American artist Elizabeth Peyton (b. 1965) has entered the National Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection in London, where it now hangs in Room 30. The work, titled “Nick at home (London), 2025,” depicts Nicholas Cullinan, the British Museum director and a familiar figure in the London art world, and marks the years he spent leading the National Portrait Gallery from 2015 to 2024.
Peyton donated the painting to the museum, giving the portrait a public life beyond the private exchange that inspired it. According to the National Portrait Gallery, Peyton and Cullinan became close while she was preparing her retrospective, “Elizabeth Peyton: Aire and Angels,” which was shown at the institution in 2019 and 2020. Peyton has said that the exhibition was a career highlight and that the friendship formed during that period continued afterward.
The placement of the work is telling. Rather than remaining a standalone likeness, the portrait now sits within the gallery’s broader story of how museums collect the people who shape them. It also reflects Peyton’s long interest in intimate, psychologically charged portraiture, where elegance and vulnerability often coexist in the same frame.
Displayed alongside Peyton’s painting is a portrait by Kaye Donachie of Erdem, the London-based Canadian fashion designer. Erdem said he has long admired Donachie’s “extraordinary and strange beauty,” while Cullinan responded on Instagram that it was “so lovely” to be beside the work.
For the National Portrait Gallery, the donation adds a contemporary layer to a collection built around likeness, influence, and cultural memory. For Peyton, it extends a portrait from private encounter into institutional record — a quiet but durable form of recognition.
