Category: WSG Outings

WSG visit, Portraying Pregnancy: from Holbein to Social Media

WSG visit to the Foundling Museum exhibition, 15th February 2020

Tour and talk by curator Karen Hearn

Report by Miriam Al Jamil

Curator Karen Hearn treated a group of WSG members to a tour of her stunning exhibition at the Foundling Museum. Her interest in the subject of ‘pregnancy portraits’ began twenty years ago when she curated a small display at Tate Britain on the painter Marcus Gheeraerts II which included his Portrait of an Unknown Lady c.1595, a recent acquisition by the Tate depicting a woman who was clearly pregnant. But it is now, Karen suggested, that the subject has really ‘found its moment’ and the current exhibition is generating a huge amount of interest. Though Karen’s area of research centres on the Early Modern, the exhibition explores portraits from the Tudor period through to current social media images. Led by the availability of material and the strict parameters she set herself, Karen has assembled a range of portraits which can reasonably be read as showing an expectant woman, whether coinciding with a portrait commission, the reason for the commission itself or a fact cleverly concealed from the viewer. We saw examples of all these; stories told through paintings, drawings, prints, books and photographs as well as through fascinating objects, dress, needlework and sculpture. The sheer range of media on show and the interaction between objects, each with an important narrative to contribute albeit within the modest space available is a triumph of skill and professional expertise.

We began our tour on the ground floor of the museum, with William Hogarth’s 1750 painting The March of the Guards to Finchley, in which a ballad-seller clings to her soldier lover, her hand on her ‘bump’, the prominent ‘rising of her apron’ as evidence of her condition. Fear and dismay often attended the unwanted pregnancies which prompted the Foundling’s original mission, but Portraying Pregnancy is concerned with depictions of the inevitable and frequently dangerous condition which defined usually married women’s lives until relatively recently and the genuine fear of death which haunted the anticipated birth. So-called ‘Mother’s Legacy’ texts were poignant letters to an unborn child in case of such an outcome, and the slim manuscript and subsequently published version written by Elizabeth Jocscelin (1622) is on show. Sadly, she did not survive, as was the case for several other women who Karen introduced to us.

Beginning with representations of The Visitation from New Testament sources, we notice again the hand on the bump, a gesture which becomes a sign in many of the oil paintings, for example in the magnificent Unknown Lady in Red (Marcus Gheeraeets II, 1620) and Lady Verney (Anthony van Dyck, late 1630’s). The delicate drawing of Cecily Heron, daughter of Sir Thomas More, by Hans Holbein II (c.1527) details the knotted ties which join her expanded stays. Cecily appears again in a reproduction of the sketch used by Holbein for a large family portrait which shows her delicate hand on her bump.

Self-portraits by women artists are an important feature of the exhibition. WSG members may remember seeing and discussing Mary Beale’s Self-portrait with Husband and Eldest Son (1659-60) at our visit to the Geffrye Museum a few years ago. The artist sits on the left, traditionally associated with the male side of a husband and wife portrait, and holds a mantle up to her chest. This may conceal her pregnancy, since her second son was born in 1660. Karen has included the pregnancy stays and matching stomacher, probably made for the daughter-in-law of lady Verney and displayed close to her portrait. We noticed it was well worn. How many of her pregnancies had happy outcomes? Plate one of William Hunter’s grim and familiar print, The anatomy of the human gravid uterus exhibited in figures (1774) is nearby to remind us of one sadly anonymous woman’s fate – anatomised along with her unborn child. Among the final exhibits is the front cover of Vanity Fair (August 2017) featuring a heavily pregnant Serena Williams. Karen pointed out that the complications Serena suffered after the birth of her daughter would probably have led to her death in a previous century and this highlights the ever-present hazards of pregnancy and serves to connect the variety of images in the exhibition which this brief report has only touched upon.

A beautiful catalogue accompanies the exhibition. It includes extra examples and discussion, Karen’s work on the subject which has been twenty years in the making!

The Portraying Pregnancy: from Holbein to Social Media will run until 26th April 2020.

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Karen is involved in other events associated with the exhibition which members might find of interest:

She is giving a lecture on Elizabethan-period pregnancy portraits, especially that of Mildred Cecil, c.1563, at the National Portrait Gallery at lunchtime on 16 April: https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/event-root/april/lunchtime-lecture-16042020

She is also speaking about portraits of Mildred Cecil at the conference on 21 April, to be held at The Garden Museum in London, to mark the 500th anniversary of the birth of her husband William Cecil, Lord Burghley: https://gardenmuseum.org.uk/events/burghley-500-symposium/

Finally, on 22 April, The Foundling Museum is holding a study day relating to the Portraying Pregnancy show. The speakers will predominantly be covering Early Modern subject matter: https://foundlingmuseum.org.uk/events/study-day-pp/

Featured images:

WSG visit to Portraying Pregnancy: From Holbein to Social Media (15th February 2020).
Alongside it is an Ivory anatomical model of a pregnant female with removable internal organs, on a cloth-covered wooden couch with ivory pillow, available from: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/ehms3mj9

Tickets still available for the WSG Portraying pregnancy tour: 11am, 15th February 2020

Karen Hearn, curator of the new exhibition at the Foundling Museum ‘Portraying Pregnancy’, will be giving the WSG a tour on 15th February, at 11am.

There are still a few places left if any member would like to join us.

The event is free, though there is a cost to enter the museum, which will be at a concession rate for the group, and free for Art Fund members. Feel free to go earlier to see the exhibition and join the group in there for the tour.

We are also planning to have lunch afterwards for anyone interested. This will be at Cosmoba Italian restaurant at 12.45 p.m. Their menu is available here: http://www.cosmoba.co.uk/. 

The address is: 9 Cosmo Pl, Holborn, London WC1N 3AP

Please contact Miriam for more details, to book and to confirm for the lunch by 31st January, at the WSG email address: wsgpostbox@gmail.com.

Miriam will be in contact shortly with those already on the list.

Tickets still available for the WSG Portraying preganancy tour: 11am, 15th February 2020

Karen Hearn, curator of the new exhibition at the Foundling Museum ‘Portraying Pregnancy’, will be giving the WSG a tour on 15th February, at 11am.

There are still a few places left if any member would like to join us.

The event is free, though there is a cost to enter the museum, which will be at a concession rate for the group, and free for Art Fund members. Feel free to go earlier to see the exhibition and join the group in there for the tour.

We are also planning to have lunch afterwards for anyone interested. This will be at Cosmoba Italian restaurant at 12.45 p.m. Their menu is available here: http://www.cosmoba.co.uk/. 

The address is: 9 Cosmo Pl, Holborn, London WC1N 3AP

Please contact Miriam for more details, to book and to confirm for the lunch by 31st January, at the WSG email address: wsgpostbox@gmail.com.

Miriam will be in contact shortly with those already on the list.

WSG members visit the National Portrait Gallery

Many thanks to WSG member Carolyn D. Williams for writing the following report on this fascinating visit. Karen Hearn will be giving a tour of her upcoming exhibition, Pregnancy Portraits, 1130am, Saturday, 15th February 2020 and if you would like to attend the tour, please send an expression of interest to Miriam Al Jamil.

On Thursday, 3 October 2019, Karen Hearn and Helen Hackett gave the National Portrait Gallery’s lunchtime lecture, on the appearance of Queen Elizabeth I at 60. WSG members were reminded of this by email and the website, and those of us who attended were treated to a presentation that was just as thought-provoking and informative as you would expect from this pairing. They alternated every few minutes, with each speaker focussing mainly on her areas of particular expertise: Helen told us a lot about written records, while Karen concentrated on the more practical details of the materials and methods used to create early modern portraits (which sometimes overlapped dangerously with the materials and methods used to apply early modern make-up). Nevertheless, it quickly became obvious from the slickness of the dovetailing that each presenter was well versed in the relevant aspects of the other’s disciplinary field.
They paid due attention to events in and around 1593, including contemporary perceptions of Elizabeth I as a waning moon, and fears about what might happen when this virgin queen died without having given birth to, or even named, a successor. They also examined more recent attitudes to her, including nineteenth-century comparisons with Queen Victoria, where the former is considered an evil tyrant and the latter a model monarch (because of her role as wife and mother). I was reminded of Louise Duckling’s conclusion to Exploring the Lives of Women 1558-1837, which draws similar comparisons, and also uses visual material to support the argument.

The most challenging element of the presentation consisted of Elizabeth I’s appearance in pictures, films, and television programmes, where she often becomes a Gothic monstrosity, with a dead white complexion, a bald pate covered by a series of unconvincing red wigs, and appalling teeth that would have fallen out years before if they had been real. These portrayals sometimes seem to have been executed without paying any attention to the date of the incident depicted: whether she was in her 40s, 50s or 60s, illustrators, performers and make-up artists have endowed Elizabeth I with perpetual, and exceptionally grotesque, old age. Perhaps this could all be accounted for by carelessness or ignorance. Anybody who attended this lecture could have learned, for example, that wearing wigs was not a sign of baldness, but a fashion that had become popular among the upper classes since the middle of the sixteenth century, when women’s hair was no longer concealed. They could also have learned that the dead white complexion to be found in so many sixteenth-century portraits was not intended by the artists, who would have added touches of vermilion: unfortunately, the vermilion has usually faded over time. As for those terrible teeth, well, yes, they were pretty bad by the end of her life, and she had lost so many on the left side of her face that her speech was indistinct, but at least she kept her slim, girlish figure to the last, due to a regimen of diet and exercise. But maybe these depictions of Elizabeth are not just mistakes. We are left wondering whether they indicate enduring hostility to older women with power.

Pregnancy Portraits at The Foundling Museum: a tour with Karen Hearn

Karen Hearn will be giving a tour of her upcoming exhibition, Pregnancy Portraits, 1130am, Saturday, 15th February 2020.

The exhibition opens on 24th January 2020 at The Foundling Museum and will close the 26th April 2020. It will explore changing social attitudes to pregnancy, and to the pregnant female form, through images and other artefacts (mainly made within Britain) dating from the 15th century to the present day.

If you would like to attend the tour, please send an expression of interest to Miriam Al Jamil.