Queer Trails

Interesting online lecture from the National Portrait Gallery for members looking at portraits of queer sitters in the collection.

Tim Redfern, performance artist and gallery guide, took us through a selection of works which he said “inform and inspire my Queer life”. It was a personal selection with an interesting bias towards people who lived in Rye where he lives. My queer history knowledge is pretty good but I’d not realised that Henry James was gay and that E.F. Benson later lived in the same house, Lamb House, in Rye. Or that Radcliffe Hall had also lived in Rye.

Away from the Kent town the talk began with James I and the Duke of Buckingham; the wonderful Edward Carpenter shown there painted by Roger Fry; the cross dressing Chevalier d’Eon who I have since listened to a full lecture about and Jan Morris.

A nice touch was to compare a portrait of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears with a photograph of Christopher Bailey and Simon Woods with their daughter to show how attitudes have changed over the last 100 years.

As ever good to get a shout out for the Bloomsbury Group who he called a “poly-amorous commune” not sure they’d have like the commune but I think the poly-amorous bit would have tickled them!