The National Portrait Gallery’s latest exhibition “Six Lives: The Story of Henry VIII’s Queens”, is the first to try and rewrite the history of these women namely, Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Katherine Parr, by emphasizing their own life stories through artifacts associated with them.
Mark Cartwright with permission with CCA
The common refrain “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived” when applied to the six wives of Henry VIII of England has meant that these women have often been viewed as one entity and not as individuals. This exhibition is attempting to correct this perception by devoting a separate room to each of them and displaying historic paintings, drawings and ephemera which is relevant to each of them. Contemporary photography, costumes and films are also used to give these women the opportunity to tell their own stories, their appearance, their relationships and legacy.
The curator of the exhibition, senior curator at The National Portrait Gallery, Charlotte Bolland, was interviewed on BBC’s Radio 4 Woman’s Hour. She stated that the wives have previously been reduced to simple rhyme and cliché, but the new exhibition seeks to focus on the stories and identities on the six individual women and their transformation into popular icons, rather than that of their infamous husband. She said that portraits are a prime mechanism to meet an individual over 500 years of history. But perhaps the most impressive images of them, also on display, are in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s black and white photos of Madam Tussaud’s waxwork models of the six wives.
Each room is dedicated to art owned or commissioned by the women; intricate jewellery and elaborate clothing is seen in most of their portraits. The Anne Boleyn room has portraits of men who were against her, or she was accused of having an affair with. A 16th C lute is displayed in Ann Boleyn's room to represent her downfall with the arrest of her alleged lover musician, Mark Sweeton, who was the first person to make an accusation of her infidelity.
Details such as Katherine Howard wishing to rehearse her execution and that Jane Seymore was protected from hearing bad news lest she had a miscarriage are represented. One portrait in the exhibition which has never been shown before is that of Katherine Parr which has an illuminating tiny detail in her jewels saying ‘Laudem Dei‘ or ‘praise god’, she a religious reformer who nearly died after being accused of heresy.
Ambassadors and courtiers flesh out the characters of the queens with their exchange of letters. In one such letter from Katherine of Aragon to Henry after the defeat of Scottish army at the battle of Flodden she writes that she was sending cloaks worn by James IV to make into banners ‘If your grace shall see how I keep my promise.’ In another Anne of Cleves is waiting in Calais to cross the channel and she asked courtiers to show her two-person card games which she could play with her new husband, asking them ‘how am I going to build a relationship with this man I do not know?’. Unfortunately for her Henry VIII had an idealized concept of love at first site, and when they first met there was a clash of cultures, although this is more often interpreted by his comment about her appearance in which he famously says, ‘She is nothing fair, I like her not’.
One portrait which still dominates the exhibition, however, is that of Holbein the younger’s portrait of Henry VIII of 1573. It is a powerful reminder of who was dominant at the time and why perhaps his wives took second place in history. The exhibition goes some way to correct this omission.
The National Portrait Gallery’s “Six Lives: The Story of Henry VIII’s Queens” opened on the 20th of June and runs until 8th September 2024.
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