This fascinating book, written in conjunction with the London National Portrait Gallery, examines what portraits are and what they can tell you about the sitter (and the artist) through examining some of the world's greatest portraits.

* Emerald/Band 15 books provide a widening range of genres including science fiction and biography, prompting more ways to respond to texts.

* Text type - Information book

* There is a useful glossary and index of pictures on pages 44-45 and a quiz on page 47, where readers have to guess the portrait from a given detail.

* Curriculum links - Art and design: the roles and purposes of artists, craftspeople and designers; History: Victorian Britain.

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

This book features in the following series: Collins Big Cat, Emerald Series .

. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading scheme has multiple levels. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

There are 48 pages in this book. This book was published 2007 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Clare Gittings has been a primary school teacher, a VSO teacher educator in the Republic of Maldives, and has been responsible for all primary school visits to the National Portrait Gallery, London, since 1989. Her published works range from a book on brass-rubbing, written when she was fourteen, to academic works of historical research. She has written extensively for children and their teachers, helping them to enjoy and see more in portraits. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years.