This book is a love story– no matter how embarrassing these words are to write or, perhaps, to read. In the most obvious sense, the book is a story about Sir George Scharf– Victorian antiquarian, man-about- London and founding director of the National Portrait Gallery– and his loving relationships with male friends. It is also, however, about other kinds of loves– George Scharf's and our own. In Middlemarch, another (female) George reminds her readers of the existence of an alternative love plot, another beloved that must be ‘wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires’. This is, of course, the plot of work or vocation: we see signs of this love in the playful curlicues of George Scharf's drawings; in the time he spent each day sketching, reading, making notes and recording these activities in his diaries; in the he paid to the details of the portraits he examined, copied and arranged; and in the hard-won pocket money he expended travelling to great English country houses to catalogue their collections. The self-educated son of an immigrant artist, Scharf loved his work and the surprisingly elevated social life that grew up around it with titled friends and younger fellows.