How the newly renovated National Portrait Gallery tells the story of the Jews in Britain

The caption describes how, elected to parliament in 1847, he refused to take his seat, rejecting the requirement to take the oath of Christian faith that all MPs had to swear.

The 1858 Jewish Relief Act was introduced to modify the oath and enabled de Rothschild to become the first practising Jewish MP. Today parliament reflects the myriad multicultural voices who exist in the UK.

The curious thing about the National Portrait Gallery is that it is not just a gallery. Art may be central, but in reality, the place is amorphous, a museum of Britain and a less touristic Madame Tussauds.

Cullinan’s intelligent curation eruditely intertwines art, history and culture. The three often sit together in dialogue with each other. Through these curatorial conversations questions and reflections about British Jewish life emerge.

Take the curious pairing of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Sid James. One was an establishment darling, a categorically British composer who counts folk music and Hubert Parry (who set William Blake’s Jerusalem to music) among his influences.

Does it get more hand-on-heart British? The other was a Jewish immigrant from South Africa who made his name playing the lecherous old lover in the Carry On films.

Ruskin Spear’s 1962 semi-cubist portrait of James is decidedly dingy. Striking in a vulgar sort of way, James is framed within a television screen in granular black and white.

A collage of tickets and stubs are pasted beneath the viewer’s perspective as if we are the artist slumped in their grubby living room watching him on screen. It is jagged and dark, almost drunkenly reaching out and grabbing the viewer by the collar.

Above James sits Sir Gerald Kelly’s elegant portrait of Vaughan Williams. The revered British composer of The Lark Ascending is slightly hunched. He is nearing the end of his illustrious life, but his firm grip grasps a conductor’s baton, the tip of which rests on a sheet of music. He too draws our attention to art, but a very different kind of art.

I want to imagine a Night at the Museum scenario where all the portraits come to life after dusk. What would Ralph say to Sid?

Did Vaughan Williams ever watch The Lavender Hill Mob or Hancock’s Half Hour when he wasn’t composing?

Did James ever unwind listening to Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony? The gilded world of classical music sits beside the bawdy earthiness of slapstick comedy. Despite their origins, the composer and the clown sit side by side.

For the most part the placard descriptions informatively touch on sitters’ Jewishness.

John Everett Millais’s fantastically imperious portrait of Benjamin Disraeli, placed so that his gaze looks towards his political rival Gladstone, facing off in art as they did in life, notes how he is the only prime minister born into a Jewish family.

One exception is the description for Cecil Beaton’s portrait of Harold Pinter. Sat underneath fellow playwrighting pioneer Shelagh Delaney, the Pinter photography has a beguiling dynamism.

Clad in a sleek black suit with cigarette in one hand, iconic heavy-rimmed glasses in the other, he stands in four poses each overlaid on top of the other.

The placard suggests that it reflects “1960s psychedelia.” Hmmm. I have to disagree.

From Hackney to Holland Park, Pinter was born in the East End to Jewish immigrant parents and, after a rollercoaster life of identities and relationships, died with a Nobel Prize for Literature under his belt as the country’s most celebrated playwright.

It is difficult to pin down Pinter. His first published work, a 1950 poem, was published under the name Harold Pinta. In his early days as a rep actor he went by the more English-sounding stage name David Baron. It points to Pinter’s enigmatic relationship with Jewishness.

An avowed atheist he rarely discussed explicit Jewishness in his work. Only the Kafkaesque Goldberg from The Birthday Party comes close to being distinctly Jewish. A handful of other characters may be coded as Jews, the patriarchal grouch Max in The Homecoming, but it can easily slide under the radar for those not in the know.

There is an anecdote from Michael Billington’s excellent biography of Pinter that is worth sharing. In the early 1950s Pinter found himself in a police station in Chelsea having punched a man who had declared that Hitler didn’t go far enough. After a confrontation the man called Pinter a Yid and the young writer responded with violence.

Despite being able to divorce himself from Jewish culture, religion, Zionist politics, and marry into the British establishment, a vestige of his Jewishness would always remain.

That chameleonic allure lingers in Beaton’s photograph. Here is Pinter the playwright, the poet and the Nobel Prize winner exuding smoky Soho cool. But underlying it is the invisible substrata: Pinter the East End Jew.

Is this not the condition of British Jewry? Are we too not always morphing ourselves to the beat of new rhythms? British Jews or Jewish Brits? Can we be considered white? Who would we support in a football match between England and Israel?

Our history is one of constant upheaval and change. We are just like Pinter, posturing, changing, finding ourselves, playing at being one thing and then something else entirely.

He might not have considered himself Jewish, but there is an undeniable Jewishness in Pinter’s portrait.

Although I have only discussed male sitters so far, the gallery boasts an almost 50-50 gender split. There is an austere canvas of Maureen Lipman on the bottom floor of the gallery. The much-loved actress radiates a quiet dignity. A humble darkness covers part of her face, befitting of an actor whose task it is to step into others’ shoes.

Lipman shares a wall in the most self-consciously diverse part of the gallery. It’s touching to see her next to filmmaker Steve McQueen, poet Kae Tempest and footballer Marcus Rashford.

But Lipman’s canvas, and theirs, is minuscule compared to a lumbering portrait of future King and Queen, William and Kate, that eats up most of the wall with its fussy golden frame. Take from that what you will.

There is one more portrait worthy of mention. Frances Segelman’s bust of the late Sir Ben Helfgott. It is one of a series by Segelman that honours British Holocaust survivors and stands in the Making of the Modern World section.

The bronze bust has a tangible solidity and warmth to it. It stands at eye level as if it is a fellow gallery goer.

The weekend I visited the gallery, the description on the adjoining placard still referred to Helfgott in the present tense. I struggled to look at it knowing that he had passed away earlier that week.

It felt disarmingly sorrowful, and yet also a celebration of an extraordinary life. That emotion encompasses the gallery. Where there could be empty spaces there are our stories.

The Jewish sitters who feature have familiar lives, threads that, along with the rest of the portraits weave into a tapestry, the story of Britain. No one thread is more important than another.

But together they make something greater than the sum of their parts. We have our place in this gallery just as we do in the history of this country.