Robert Baden-Powell: Defender of Mafeking and Founder of the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides

The acquisition in May 2004 of four original large format glass negatives taken by the Australian-born photographer H.Walter Barnett (1862-1934) provided the inspiration for the first comprehensive display of photographs of Baden-Powell from the National Portrait Gallery's collection. Many of the items appear here for the first time and give an iconographic context to the Gallery's remarkable 1903 portrait of Baden-Powell by Hubert von Herkomer also on show in Room 23. Apart from Walter Stoneman's 1927 photograph taken for the National Photographic Record all the other photographs shown here have been acquired in the last thirty years.