Throughout its history (over 200 years), South Place Ethical Society has collected texts and archive material relating to its Freethinking and Humanist aims. However, in addition to printed material, it has also collected portraits of those involved with the Society. Portraits of Bertrand Russell, Thomas Paine, and Moncure Conway (abolitionist and friend of Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Darwin) hang alongside key figures of Freethought and Humanism: William Johnson Fox, George Jacob Holyoake (painted by Walter Rowland Holyoake), Chapman Cohen, and Charles Albert Watts (painted by John Collier). We also have portraits of Robert Ingersoll (American Civil War veteran, defender of agnosticism and friend of Walt Whitman), E. M. Forster, Edward Clodd (Chairman of the Rationalist Press Association) and John Saunders, who played at the South Place Concerts for 27 years.