'Vanity Fair Portraits' at LACMA

Founded in 1856, London's National Portrait Gallery is a place where the people in the pictures, not the pictures themselves, are what count. The museum's website explains: "The National Portrait Gallery was established with the criteria that the Gallery was to be about history, not about art, and about the status of the sitter, rather than the quality or character of a particular image considered as a work of art. This criterion is still used by the Gallery today."

By CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT

October 31, 2008