The exhibition will be the gallery’s first historical exhibition since reopening.
On display from the 20th June until the 8th September, the National Portrait Gallery’s Six Lives exhibition will bring together over 140 works to highlight the lives of Henry VIII’s queens.
Featuring sixteenth-century paintings by Hans Holbein the Younger and contemporary photography by Hiroshi Sugimoto, Six Lives: the Stories of Henry VIII’s Queens will examine the representation of Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Katherine Parr, both in their own time and in the centuries since they lived.
Presented in a chronological order, this major exhibition will place the focus on the women rather than Henry VIII himself and will feature a number of historic paintings, miniatures, drawings and the queens’ personal possessions to contemporary photography, costume and film, the exhibition will draw upon a wealth of factual and fictional material to place the spotlight on six women who helped to shape a fascinating period of English history.
This display will also allow visitors to find out more about the family connections that saw each woman ending up at the Tudor court.
Highlights on display as part of the exhibition will include: a recently conserved historic painted panel of Katherine Parr, attributed to ‘Master John’, and a portrait of Anne of Cleves by Edgar Degas. The three-quarter-length portrait of Katherine Parr was long believed to have been lost – destroyed by a fire in 1949 – and will be publically displayed for the first time since its conservation and sale at auction last year, while the portrait by Degas offers an unusual encounter with the sixteenth-century queen through the eyes of the renowned French Impressionist painter.
Other important artefacts on display include: Katherine of Aragon’s writing box; Anne Boleyn’s inscribed book of hours, her signature deliberately erased; an illustrated bible commissioned by Thomas Cromwell after the death of Jane Seymour, publically displayed for the first time; Anne of Cleves’ account book of her expenses as queen; a portrait miniature, thought to depict Katherine Howard by Hans Holbein the Younger; and a prayer book written by Katherine Parr, bearing an inscription from Henry VIII to her, displayed in London for the first time.
Meanwhile, on entering the exhibition, visitors will also see contemporary works by renowned artist, Hiroshi Sugimoto, shown in London for the first time alongside historic items. Taken in 1999, the black and white photographs capture six individual portraits – waxwork depictions of each queen – made by Madame Tussaud’s.
To look at these women’s lives further and how they have been portrayed throughout history, depictions from cinema, theatre, opera and television will be brought together to explore how the queens have been interpreted in popular culture. The exhibition will include Katherine of Aragon’s character costume from the West End’s SIX the Musical; film clips and marketing material from the German film Anna Boleyn (1920); costume from stage performances at both the Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal Opera House; and collaged designs created for the 1970 BBC television production, The Six Wives of Henry VIII.
Talking about the exhibition, Dr. Charlotte Bolland Senior Curator of Research and 16th Century Collections at the National Portrait Gallery said: “Henry VIII was the star around which the country and Tudor court orbited. In his nearly 38-year reign, the six women who married him were protagonists in an almost implausible melodrama. Often reduced to the rhyme ‘Divorced, Beheaded, Died / Divorced, Beheaded, Survived,’ this exhibition seeks to restore the queens’ individuality and agency in both historic and contemporary storytelling, bringing them out of Henry’s shadow and their homogenous grouping. By encountering the court culture in which they performed their roles as queens, the images of their families and peers, the works that they commissioned, the objects they owned and even the letters and notes that they wrote, we cannot fail to glimpse them as individuals. In this exhibition, the faint surviving traces of each queen are displayed alongside the portraits that have helped to turn them into icons.”
To book tickets for the exhibition visit: https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2024/six-lives?