BEYOND HEADSHOTS
Centuries of British royal drama at MFAH
Walking through “Tudors to Windsors” feels like binge-watching a 500-year version of “The Crown.”
The first big exhibition of the season at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston opens Sunday and offers a deliciously engrossing history lesson, even if British royals are not your usual cup of tea.
The saga of King Henry VIII, with his six unfortunate wives and his dueling queen daughters, Mary and Elizabeth I, will be familiar. Ditto the famous love story of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who married off eight of their nine children to form alliances across Europe that ripped the family apart during World War I, and the current four generations of Windsors, whose weddings and funerals have captured bigger TV audiences — in the 20 million range — than many of this season’s NFL games.
“There’s so much plot, as it were, in terms of the wives, the drama, the religion.” Charlotte Bolland, London’s National Portrait Gallery 16th-century specialist
But they are just part of a seemingly endless cast of captivating figures who were all the pop stars of their day.
It makes you wonder, why do we find British royalty so fascinating?
For one thing, because they still exist, having endured in spite of the disappearance of other European monarchies. Even the dynasties of centuries ago remain wildly alive in literature, plays, operas and in countless books and films. And they’re not boring: Bloodthirsty, cruel, fashionable, oversexed, they’ve got it all.
David Bomford, the British native who led the MFAH curatorial team for “Tudors to Windsors,” calls the royals geniuses of reinvention. “If a line of succession ran out of heirs, which happened with amazing regularity, somebody else could always be found to slip into the driver’s seat to keep the formidable machine rolling along,” he said. “Mind you, it wasn’t always a smooth ride. In the first room of the exhibition alone, no less than eight people lose their heads. And in the second is the regicide (killing of a king) that still seems shocking today.”
Charlotte Bolland, a 16thcentury specialist from London’s National Portrait Gallery, also thinks we can’t resist the juicy narratives. “There’s so much plot, as it were, in terms of the wives, the drama, the religion,” she said.
Bolland finds the Tudors’ story especially rich; their era brought the dawn of portraits by international masters such as Hans Holbein the Younger, who were the first to depict royals with their real likenesses. “So you have this coincidence of incredibly seismic change happening with images by Holbein … that suddenly bring these people into populating your imagination,” she said.
Another major shift arrived in the 20th century, when Victoria and Albert embraced the new medium of photography. Suddenly, the world began to see royals in more intimate situations, at home. “They allowed people in and created a different kind of icon,” Bolland said.
King George V, Victoria and Albert’s grandson, cannily recognized the value not just of that imagery but everything behind it. As World War I erupted, the chaotic world needed sympathetic symbols of stable, patriotic, family values. The royals could provide that, along with sharing the much-needed pomp and circumstance of their fairy-tale existence.
George V literally rebranded the royal family in 1917, changing their surname from Albert’s problematic, German “SaxeCoberg” to the made-up “Windsor,” after one of their castles.
Because Houston is the only U.S. venue for “Tudors to Windsors,” a collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery that also will go to Australia, the city can expect a small invasion of Anglophiles from across the country who will travel here to see it. (Retailers are capitalizing already: Central Market had a display of goods from the British Isles up last week.)
The show contains about 150 works, mostly paintings, with a few sculptures and other objects that make the personalities feel even more immediate and real. (Among those pieces are death masks, an ornate breastplate worn by King Henry VIII and a ballgown that belonged to Diana, Princess of Wales.)
The galleries are divided by dynasty — Tudors, Stuarts, Georgians, Victorians and Windsors — each a magnificent reminder of many less-celebrated princes, princesses, kings, queens, mistresses and miscreants who have contributed to the royal mystique.
Most of the paintings fairly drip with the glitter of the subjects’ gems and the palpable textures of brocades, velvet and ermine. One highly anticipated masterpiece is a late arrival that will be hung in the coming weeks: a famous Holbein portrait of King Henry VIII from the Barberini Palace in Rome.
The show’s bigggest drama surfaces in a work that’s a historical painting, not a portrait: Paul Delaroche’s “The Execution of Lady Jane Grey,” a highly romanticized, 19th-century work imagining the beheading of the teenager known as the “Nine Day Queen.” The painting has caused a sensation twice: when Delaroche exhibited it at the Paris salon and again, a few decades ago, after it was discovered rolled up inside a carpet in the basement of the Tate Galleries.
No one would want to mess with the untouchable figure of the magnificent “Ditchley” portrait, which opens the show.
Standing authoritatively atop a map of England, wearing a dress three times larger than her body that’s bedecked with jewels and other symbols of her immense wealth and power, Queen Elizabeth I is not just divine, but a divinity. That was the point of Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger’s awe-inspiring portrayal.
Bollard said such stylized images reflect a “great rupture in visual culture” that happened during the Reformation. “The idea is the distrust of images,” she said. “They’re not in any way trying to trick you into thinking this is a real person. It is a depiction.”
A number of the early portraits are so highly stylized they look odd now. For example, painter William Larkin gives George Villiers, the 1st Duke of Buckingham, astoundingly long and skinny legs, a desirable attribute.
The stunning bookend to the “Ditchley” portrait is Chris Levine’s “The Lightness of Being,” a marvelous lenticular photograph in a lightbox — like a hologram — of Queen Elizabeth II with her eyes closed. Is she serene or just tired? One might interpret it either way. She looks as otherwordly, in a contemporary way, as her ancestral namesake.
But look at all the portraits around her — including seminal images of Diana, Charles, William and Harry — and it’s a reminder that today’s royals are beloved not because they are divine but because they are human. Like all of us.
Right.