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“Not another Henry VIII exhibition?” School boys and girls the nation over can be heard to groan, clutching questionable packed lunches on hot museum-bound buses. Henry VIII rolls in his grave, having been wheeled out yet again in a fate worse than having endured six unsatisfactory wives. Enter the National Portrait Gallery’s latest production, a vibrant retelling of the trope-ridden Henry VIII set piece.
On entering the exhibition, a tense scene is carefully set. The splendiferous Holbein-workshop portrait of Henry VIII looms over the viewer, who is forced to step back in order to survey the full glittering regality of the monarch. The scale of the painting, over two meters high, unhesitatingly asserts the power-dynamic between subject and onlooker, an in-built device demanding deference. In the near distance, a dark, monochromatic chamber beckons, containing within a po-faced gallery of souls, Henry VIII’s six wives, as envisioned by Hiroshi Sugimoto. The ghostly white faces, a portrait photograph series of wax models, float mournfully upon the black walls; the sort of gloomy harem that could exist only in Tudor England.
These renditions of the six queens and the inclusion, in the next room, of modern paraphernalia from television, theatre, and opera, relating to various retellings of their lives, prime the viewer and serve as a visual palette-cleanser for the rich immersion that follows in the rooms beyond. Although I could certainly have done without the gold chains and black Spandex that constituted Katherine of Aragon’s cyborg-Tudor-burlesque assemblage from the musical SIX – let’s not lose our heads, NPG.
This is primarily an exhibition about women in the context of Tudor court. Therefore, the immersion fittingly commences in a room of allegorical, mythological, and biblical heroines presented in a sumptuous display of paintings and tapestries that correspond to items listed in The Inventory of Henry VIII, a list of possessions of the crown in 1547: Esther beseeching her husband, the Persian King Ahasuerus, to spare the lives of her cousin and people; Lucretia at the point of suicide in preservation of her remaining honour; the penitent Mary Magdalene.
These works proclaim the idealised virtues of women in the Tudor court, in an aesthetic and visual manner commensurate with the way in which Henry VIII’s wives may very well have been presented with these moralising messages. Here, the curators have aptly fulfilled their roles as enablers of understanding by presenting morals in their context – no Marxist takes on Medieval history here!
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