Tag: cultural history

The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England

An exhibition review by Valerie Schutte

The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England is a dynamic exhibition of Tudor artifacts currently touring the United States. On 14 May 2023, it wrapped up the second leg of its tour at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which was preceded by three months at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from 10 October 2022 to 8 January 2023, to be followed by three months at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, from 24 June to 24 September 2023.

The accompanying exhibition catalogue is filled with full-page color images of every item, though not all are on display at all three museums. It also includes entries for items not on display at any of the exhibition stops because some of the loans were cut by the time the exhibition opened in October 2022, being delayed from its original autumn 2020 opening date.

As I saw the exhibition twice in Cleveland, I was unable to see many of the items related to Queen Mary I that were not displayed at this venue. These items included Hans Eworth’s 1554 portrait of her, as well as the cartoons for the panels donated by Philip and Mary for the Last Supper “King’s Window” at Sint-Janskerk, Gouda, though they are both beautifully represented in the catalogue. As a scholar of Mary I, I also have minor objections to the descriptions of some of the entries. For example, item number 27 is a 1557 copy of Juan Luis Vives’ Instruction of a Christen Woman on loan from the British Library. The catalogue description was written by Sarah Bochicchio, a PhD Candidate in art history at Yale University. While Bochicchio points out that Vives was a spiritual advisor to Catherine of Aragon and a director of Mary’s studies, she also writes that the text informed Mary and Elizabeth as inheritors of a gendered hierarchy of leadership. Furthermore, on the object label at the exhibition, Catherine of Aragon is not even mentioned, while the description highlights how both Mary and Elizabeth navigated a gendered duality during their queenships. While this is accurate, I am frustrated that such a powerful monument to Catherine and Mary must be discussed in terms of its importance to Elizabeth, thus fortifying the public perception of Elizabeth being a more important or worthy Tudor queen.

However, the more than 80 items on display in Cleveland showcased visual art as a formidable tool of monarchical power, from paintings and drawings to cups and bowls, and suits of armor to giant hanging tapestries. Various museums and private collections across Europe and the United States contributed displayed items. The Devonshire Collection at Hardwick Hall lent the “Sea Dog” table, a drawing table so called because of the sea dogs carved into its walnut legs, the Victoria and Albert Museum lent the Heneage Jewel, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna lent Hans Holbein’s painting of Jane Seymour, while the newly-crowned King Charles III lent a miniature of Henry VIII and drawings by Holbein from the Royal Collection. These are only a few of the museums and collectors who participated in fielding these artifacts.

While some of the displayed items are well known, such as the painting of Henry VIII from the workshop of Hans Holbein and both the Sieve and Rainbow portraits of Elizabeth, many are lessor known artifacts that still portrayed the magnificence of the Tudor court. These include the ewer and basin engraved with portrait medallions of the monarchs on loan by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the embroidered portrait of Elizabeth I in a garden loaned from a private collection. 

Altogether the exhibition overwhelms its viewers with images of majesty, power, and Renaissance ideas of humanism and antique glory. The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England is not to be missed, as this variety of Tudor objects and artifacts is not likely to be showcased in the United States again anytime soon.

Valerie Schutte is a historian who specialises in books dedicated to Tudor queens. She has published two monographs and her seventh edited collection will be published later this year – Mid-Tudor Queenship and Memory: The Making and Re-Making of Lady Jane Grey and Mary I. She is editing a special issue of the Royal Studies Journal to be published in December 2023 on Tudor royal sexualities. Schutte is currently writing a cultural biography of Anne of Cleves and is working on several essays on Queen Mary I.

Reminder: WSG seminar January 2021

The fourth seminar of the year takes place on Saturday, 1pm (GMT), 23 January 2021.

This meeting will be delivered on Zoom. All meetings will start promptly at 1pm GMT (with arrivals from 12.30 onward to allow for necessary preparations and administration). We aim to finish by 3.30pm. If you would like to attend, please make sure your membership is up-to-date to receive the Zoom link.

January 23, 2021
Megan Shaw: Looking towards a cultural history of Katherine Villiers, Duchess of Buckingham (1603-1649).

This paper will explore how Katherine Villiers (neé Manners, 1603 – 1649), Duchess of Buckingham harnessed portraiture – in miniature and in large – and epistolary exchange as devices for affection, commemoration and self-preservation at the Stuart court. Katherine was the wife of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham (1592 – 1628), the royal favourite to both James VI & I and Charles I of England. This paper is contextualised through painted portraits and by analysing the highly emotive, and often distressing, letters which the duchess wrote to her “dear heart” throughout their marriage. The Duke of Buckingham was assassinated in September 1628 which prompted a visual display of grief and a reassertion of loyalty in Katherine’s mourning portraits painted by Anthony van Dyck and Henri Beaubrun. These poignant portraits featured her husbands’ likeness in miniature. Connections will be drawn between the functions of the portrait miniature as devotional objects which could be privately concealed, displayed or activated in public at the will of their owner or wearer. I argue that their presence in the duchess’ mourning portraits conveyed a public message of her loss, and furthermore reinforced the political leverage of remembrance and the renegotiations – and even performance – of power that commemoration offered.

Gillian Beattie-Smith: Catherine Helen Spence: a consideration of her feminist and transnational agency.

Catherine Helen Spence (1825-1910), born in Melrose, Scotland, emigrated to Australia as a girl with her family.  Spence was a novelist, journalist, a leader in the international suffragist movement, a Georgist, and a proponent of proportional representation.  She was a public intellectual, who addressed audiences across Australia, America and Britain, and was a widely-respected social reformer.  Her life is commemorated in a statue, Australian currency, and place names, and memorialised in her extensive body of writing.

Spence’s novels have been compared with those of Eliot and Gaskell, and positioned in the development of European realist fiction, and the international tradition of feminist writing.  The body of literary critique and biographical record has grown on Spence in recent years, enabling alternative discourses of settler women writers as cultural agents in Australian foundational history.

This paper reflects on Spence’s feminist and transnational agency in her life and work.

Kate Stephenson: Lawyers, Débardeuses and Pages; Women Masquerading as Men.

Masquerades became popular in Britain in the early-18th century, finding a home at theatres as well as pleasure gardens such as Ranelagh and Vauxhall. These provided the opportunity for attendees to dress up in a huge variety of creative costumes and this tradition continued into the 19th century with fancy dress balls. Contemporary reports suggest that a not insignificant number of women used these events to subvert established gender norms and dress as men. This led to contemporary anxieties regarding the transgression of moral and social boundaries and the suggestion that cross-dressing, as well as fancy dress events more generally, could lead to homosexuality, sexual liaisons (and consequently pregnancy and venereal disease) and the breakdown of established social structures. This work-in-progress paper will examine women’s costume choices at masquerades and masked balls in the long 18th century with a focus on cross-dressing, investigating what kinds of women cross-dressed, what costumes they chose and how their choices changed over time.

For further information including abstracts, see our seminars page.  To join the WSG, see our membership page.