Cathy's Art Diary

Thoughtful exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery looking at Henry VIII’s wives. The show cleverly started by looking at the afterlife of the women and how their stories have been told on stage and screen and in literature. It discussed how each era has projected their own values onto them. As a child of the 70s I was excited to see costume designs for the tv series on them which I loved and which probably sparked my interest in history. These were shown alongside costumes from other productions including the current “Six”. The show then went on to set the scene of what the court was like and in particular the role of mythical and biblical stories in the art and literature. The meat of the show then went through the Queens in order discussing their lives and the people around them and giving a flavour of what they collected and had around them. There were beautiful objects and paintings including good use of miniatures. The show was full of excited Tudor geeks when I wa...

Gem of an exhibition at Franses of tapestries owned by Henry VIII on loan from a private collection. It was stunning to see tapestries in such good condition and to realise how bright the colours were and the detail they showed. The level of scholarship was fascinating too with excellent descriptions explained where they hung, why they were commissioned and how they were recorded in the inventory of Henry’s possessions on his death. The foyer has some small works including a tapestry of leaves inspired by the New World which had hung in Lady Elizabeth’s Guardrobe and a table carpet possibly made by Maria of Austria. You see table carpets in so many Tudor portraits but I’d never seen on in real life before. The main room had three impressive large tapestries. My favourite was one of St Paul directing the burning of heretic books, part of a set commissioned from Pieter Coecke van Alest for Henry in 1538-9. The iconography was showing that there was a biblical precedent f...

Superb exhibition at the British Library looking at the life of Henry VIII. It had the original of everything you’d want to see! There were wonderful portraits including the Holbein original of Edward VI from Dresden. It was a highly intelligent exhibition put together in a very academic fashion and yet it wasn’t dry. The coverage of the Reformation was fantastic. There were two or more cases of the books Henry collected to find evidence to support his divorce. It was amazing to see the hand he had drawn in a copy of Leviticus pointing at he passage about not marrying your brothers wife. I will say you need to give it a lot of time in fact I’d suggest two visits! I spent two hours and was getting slightly hysterical! I’d done the young Henry, the Reformation, the Field of Cloth of Gold, various wars and six wives at which point we then seemed to ruin into trouble with Scotland! At the point I started laughing in a slightly desperate way and had to speed up! I was with a friend so thi...