And we're not talking about just any bum. Curators, museums and galleries from around the world have been putting their nominations for the best artistic bum by using #bestmuseumbum.

But surely, Canberra's institutions have some pretty good entries for the title themselves? We reached out to them to see what they had to offer. Did they all get back to us? No. Did we get some good entries? Yes.

And we got some expert advice as to what a portrait that includes the behind adds to the overall artwork.

"One idea of portraiture is a lot of myth around is that idea of a face being the only thing conveying something," National Portrait Gallery curator Penny Grist says.

"But the way that you interact with your fellow human beings is getting information from that whole body that is presented to you. And you can feel that in a portrait, where you don't have that information from the face, or you can't, or they have their eyes closed and you're not getting that information from their eyes."

So without further ado, here are the #bestmuseumbums that the portrait gallery and Canberra Museum and Gallery (CMAG) put forward, in no particular order.

This is the entry which Grist believes is the portrait gallery's best entry due to the former principal dancer with the Australian Ballet Steven Heathcote's dancer's musculature.

"He's so balanced and strong and graceful it's like all the things you need in a bum and it's sort of the way that Julian Kingma captured him in this portrait, with that beautiful dancer's posture," she says.

"I had it on display in the exhibition I did a few years ago called Bare: Degrees of Undress, which was basically about bareness in portraiture and analysing how people's choices to reveal parts of themselves and their bodies can be indicated about their identity and their role, and this was a lovely example of that.

"Of his bareness in this portrait, and those lines of his body being an expression of the tool he uses in his work as a dancer.

"It's extraordinary in portraiture how you can feel these intangible qualities like discipline. That incredible discipline is what kind of shines out of this image."

It's not the type of photo that you expect to come out of 1899, but the small silver print featuring artist, cartoonist, and writer Norman Lindsay with his friend Jacques Casteau gives an insight into the lives led by creatives at the turn of the century.

"This just gives that sense of that kind of unrestricted free space they kind of carved out for themselves in what you would sort of imagined was quite a buttoned-up age," Grist says.

"People didn't cavort around the bush naked in 1899 but they did. This was true of the Lindsays and their incredible friends.

"Norman Lindsay never participated in the restrictions of society at any point and continued to, you know, really have his own theory about the body and his own theory about sexuality through his work. I just think it would have been the most extraordinary household."

Not only is Barbara Blackman the only woman to make the list, but she is also the only person who plays the dual role of model and sitter.

"It's both a portrait of her and a portrait of a model which is so rare because models are not there to have portraits made of them. They're there to be painted as an unidentified body," Grist says.

"It's a really interesting parallel to the Heathcoat one in a way, in that she's also wearing the clothes, you could say, of her profession as a model, because a state of undress was the clothes for that work.

"She wrote a lovely piece for our Portrait magazine in 2004 called Life Class which was sort of her recollections of her time as an artist model. She says she remembers thinking: 'This is really me - sitting here without a stitch of clothing on, naked, motherless nude, starkers - up on a dais in front of a room full of unknown people'."

There's a certain intimacy about the portrait of painter Lloyd Rees, which comes despite the fact he is fully clothed - unlike some of the other entrants. It's part of the reason why Grist chose the photo.

"You almost never get the chance to be in an artist's studio when they're painting. It is so intimate and in a way more intimate than the public revelation of nudity that we see in the others," she says.

"You're there in his private creative space you know seeing him painting, and I love the concept of the bum that is if you're looking at someone's bum you're also looking over their shoulder.

"And I just wanted to get an old bum in there. I particularly like the string that's clearly holding up his pants there and his old jumper."

It may be an elephant behind, but it's a #bestmuseumbum nonetheless.

The print by Jan Brown, who taught for more than 40 years at the Canberra Technical College through its evolution into the ANU School of Art, was one of the many pieces she did of birds and animals, having gained a sustained interest in the representation of the subjects.

They're beach bums but not as you know it.

The screenprint by Toni Robertson featuring beachgoers out the front of the High Court is part of a series of Canberra "beach scenes" created while she lived in the capital during the 1980s.

The posters were part of Sites of power: an exhibition of posters and prints, which focused on the theme of government and political dissent.

Each was characteristic of Robertson's work, mixing different familiar and everyday sites with subversive elements. The Canberra beaches embedded classic Australian vignettes of beachgoers over some of the capital's monuments.