What links Tippett to Shaw - via Elgar and Leighton?

The National Portrait Gallery weaves a musical web

A new exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery draws together a number of significant figures whose lives are connected in some way through music. Most are musicians, though artists and writers also feature as parts of the web through which the lives interconnected. Connections range from the profound to the personal, embracing both the accidental and the incidental. The exhibition’s title – Only Connect – comes from E M Forster’s Howard’s End, a novel deeply concerned with the complexities of social and emotional relationships.

Violinist Peter Sheppard Skærved has devised the display, in collaboration with Paul Moorhouse, NPG 20th-century curator, who said: "People rarely exist in isolation but are connected with each other. Only Connect offers a new way of looking at portraits by focusing on the connections – in this case musical connections – that link all the individuals featured in the display. It may look unusual at first, but we hope our visitors will enjoy this alternative way of thinking about portraiture".

This gallery presents 12 of the portraits from the exhibition, along with details of how the subjects' lives are linked. Click any image below to launch the Gallery - you can also open a list of full captions and credits in a new window.

The exhibition is in Room 33 of the National Portrait Gallery, London, from April 16 until November 27. Admission is free.