NEW EXHIBITION: HENRY VIII'S SIX QUEENS
The National Portrait Gallery's new show is a Tudor masterpiece - here are a few of the highlights
It is a year since the National Portrait Gallery in London reopened its doors, after a very long closure, during which the entire collection was rehung. From tomorrow (June 20th), you can visit the first major exhibition of historic portraits to be staged there since that reopening.
The subject of that exhibition is the Six Wives of Henry VIII. Which is, I think, a bold and brilliant choice.
It is not bold and brilliant because it is an original idea. Rather, it is bold and brilliant because it shows that a major public gallery has decided to tailor its creative decisions to what real people - the Great British Public, about whom we hear so much, most of it humbug - actually like.
There are few more popular subjects in British history than Henry and his wives; and even fewer whose popularity is rooted in portraiture. Thanks to Hans Holbein and others like him, the Tudor court is the first in British history whose leading characters we can vividly picture. (Pun intended/ish.)
And Six Lives is not only a good idea. It is also superbly executed. The curator, Charlotte Bolland, has played a blinder. She has focused the exhibition on Henry’s queens without totally losing sight of the old goat himself, as though he were just some fat bloke who lurked around Whitehall eating chicken drumsticks and having conflicted thoughts about the Pope.
Bolland has gathered an astonishing and near-comprehensive collection of contemporary Tudor portraiture, and arranged it smartly alongside later pieces which explore how future generations of artists have thought about sixteenth-century history.
If you can get to London this summer, go and see this exhibition. Do it. Go to London in order to do it. No matter how much you think you have seen of the Henry and his wives, there will be something there to make you stop and gasp, laugh or shake your head in wonder.
Above is just one of the portraits that made me do all those things. It’s a late sixteenth-century painting of Katherine Parr, after Holbein’s successor as court painter, William Scrots.
I snapped this last night at the private view of the exhibition, a joyful evening full of Tudor history glitterati.
Had I wanted to, I could have had selfies with David Starkey, Suzannah Lipscomb, Tracy Borman, Alison Weir, Lucy Worsley, John Guy, Julia Fox, etc etc etc etc. But I did not want to. I wanted to drink champagne and toast the NPG for smashing the sixteenth century out of the park. More pics below. Enjoy!
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