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Review: Tudors to Windsors, Bendigo Art Gallery

With art at its heart and history in its head, Bendigo Art Gallery’s newest and best blockbuster is a right royal treat for monarchists and republicans alike.
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Queen Elizabeth I (The ‘Ditchley’ portrait) by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, c.1592 © National Portrait Gallery, London.

The royals will always have their loyal supporters, but what about the other half of us, those like me who want to see an Australian republic? Why would we want to see a blockbuster dedicated to a 500-year history of the British monarchy when all we want to see is the end of them? The short answer comes in three words: quality, scale and depth. This goes beyond politics to art and history, and to the personal, finding the common humanity in us all.

It takes two steps into the exhibition to fall under its spell. Directly on your right is where the story starts, with Henry Tudor, King Henry VII. Now you come face to face with history, but through the lens of time where the famous are now merely human. This Henry by an unknown artist is a study in simplicity, save for an ornamental chain and a hat brooch. He could be a face you pass on the street. Next to his portrait are electrotype copies of the bronze effigies by Pietro Torrigiano of the king and his wife, Elizabeth of York, as they are in their double tomb at Westminster Abbey. Together they are at prayer, husband and wife in a moment of private devotion, graced by a hallowed light. There is nothing about their pious manner that predicts the pageants of pomp and power that were to follow with their son, Henry VIII, granddaughter Elizabeth I, and all the royal lines that followed through to the 20th century.

By now you realise you are in for something special, without knowing how special, because how are you to know how much more there is to come and what surprises are in store as you walk through five centuries of western European history telling the story of five royal houses, right up until the very present? It is history all right, their history originally, but ours also, as we depart the Middle Ages and travel through the Stuarts, Georgians and Victorians, tracing the trajectory of power from a God-given right to a ceremonial role. With the Windsors, we see the royals come down from the throne and into our homes.

Henry, Prince of Wales by Robert Peake the Elder, c.1610 © National Portrait Gallery, London.

This is why the pivotal point of the exhibition is Conversation piece at the Royal Lodge, Windsor by Sir James Gunn. Here are the royals having tea in a scene that could have come from the pages of a Ladybird book. George VI is less a king and more a father and head of the house, the centre of the attention of his wife and two daughters. The setting might be grander than most, but it is more middle class than palatial, and what they are doing is nothing different to what we all do at home. We see us in them.

The difference between this modern image and previous images such as The ‘Ditchley’ portrait of Elizabeth I by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger is media. Before mass media the royals were presented as being larger than life. The Ditchley Elizabeth stands 2.5 metres high, a metre more than her actual height, and has her as a giant with England literally at her feet. But now the royals are media products, and through media the royals come into our houses as part of our daily lives in newspapers and magazines, on radio and television, and in merchandise like tea towels and mugs. Here the exhibition divides. Up until now it has been painting after painting, but from the time of the Windsors we see on the walls more of a mix of media, and history becomes the contemporary.

To see Tudors to Windsors is to see the ways the world has changed right in front of your eyes. You can’t help but notice changes in the ways power is presented, or how we dress or what we use and how we like to be amused. We see the slow march of democracy and the rise of popular culture.

Tudors to Windsors: British Royal Portraits from the National Portrait Gallery, London
16 March – 14 July2019. Supplied.

For all its attractions, first and foremost this is an exhibition of art and, at that, art of the very highest quality. After all, that’s the point of the royals. Only the best could represent them. So we have a parade of the finest artists working in Britain over the last 500 years. Here are some 200 treasures from the National Portrait Gallery, most of them being seen for the first time outside of the United Kingdom and never before assembled in this way, even in the UK.

By its nature you would expect to see Sir Peter Lely and Anthony van Dyck, and Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds, but you wouldn’t necessarily be expecting Andy Warhol or Chris Levine or a photo by David Dawson of Lucian Freud at work on his own portrait of the Queen. It’s with the Windsors that photographs became a favoured form of portraiture. So, you will have Annie Liebovitz here, and Lord Snowdon, himself once a royal, as well as Cecil Beaton, Mario Testino, Nadav Kander and Yousuf Karsh among many others.

You gradually gather the sense that this is a show of scale, a chronological series of seemingly endless rooms of royal tributes and effects that can become exhausting. One viewing cannot possibly cover the cavalcade of characters that has become part of our history, consciously or not. So in part this is a show of art, but it is also an immersion in information, either directly through all the artwork labels and timelines and family trees on display, or subliminally through the thoughts and impressions you have as you gaze and ponder the works all around you. You will certainly walk out of the exhibition better informed than when you walked in, and if you paid attention to it all, you could even count yourself a casual scholar of the period as you step out of the gallery into View Street.

Besides the 2D selections from the National Portrait Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery has given the exhibition greater depth with its 3D supplements by curating artefacts and personal effects from the Historic Royal Palaces, Fashion Museum in Bath, the Royal Armouries, FIDM Museum, LA, National Gallery of Victoria, State Library of Victoria and Art Gallery of South Australia.

Queen Victoria by Bertha Müller, after Heinrich von Angeli, 1900, based on a work of 1899 © National Portrait Gallery, London.

These give flesh and blood to the flatness of the portraits. Whether it’s armour or costumes or jewellery or sceptres and crowns, we are one touch from the royal presences. The sight of the coronation glove of Elizabeth I brought me closer to the queen than any of the portraits. You marvel that so much power could be held by such a tiny hand with such thin fingers, and you thrill to find the history so immediate that you can feel it in your bones.

Tudors to Windsors is exclusive to Bendigo Art Gallery, a regional gallery with an international reputation. You will see this nowhere else in Australia. It is the product of a relationship with the National Portrait Gallery since 2005 and the fruit of the collaborative work over the last two years. It is the latest in a series of outstanding international exhibitions that includes Grace Kelly: Style Icon, Bendigo Art Gallery and Twentieth Century Fox Present Marilyn Monroe, Undressed: 350 Years of Underwear in Fashion (in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum) and The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece (in collaboration with the British Museum).

Along that line of pedigree,Tudors to Windsors is the best of the blockbusters simply because of those three words: quality, scale and depth. Not to diminish their impact or popularity, but by comparison the others were smaller in their subject range, less extensive in quality and thinner in their mix of items and pieces. This won’t come this way again. I am going again, better prepared now. I will be booking two days of tickets.

Rating: 5 stars ★★★★★
Tudors to Windsors: British Royal Portraits

From the National Portrait Gallery, London
Curators: Louise Stewart, National Portrait Gallery, London; co-curator Tansy Curtin, Bendigo Art Gallery

16 March – 14 July, 2019
Bendigo Art Gallery

 
Paul Isbel
About the Author
Paul Isbel is a former ArtsHub contributor and a publicist for the Australasian Arts and Antiques Dealers Association. Most recently he was a course designer for an entry-level vocational training program for the arts sector.