BATH.- In the Holburne Museum’s opening exhibition of 2022, The Tudors: Passion, Power and Politics, visitors will come face-to-face with the five Tudor monarchs - Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I - who, to this day, remain some of the most familiar figures in English history; not least because these instantly recognisable portraits have preserved their likenesses for five centuries.

This focused exhibition, has been developed in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery and National Museums Liverpool. The exhibition is a unique opportunity to see a large group of works from The Gallery’s popular Tudor Collection, while the NPG is currently closed for the Inspiring People redevelopment project. The exhibition includes some of the most iconic images in British painting, including the ‘Darnley’ and ‘Armada’ portraits of Elizabeth I.

Several of the works have never been shown outside London, including a portrait of Jane Seymour after Hans Holbein the Younger and the highly unusual Sir Henry Unton (c.1558–1596) portrait, which was painted posthumously and charts key moments in his life and death.

Rising from Gwynedd, North Wales, the Tudor dynasty’s reign over 16th-century England, from 1485 to 1603, encompassed the tumultuous years of the Reformation; conflict with Scotland, France, and Spain; conquest and colonisation in Ireland and the Americas; and the expansion of England’s global reach via piracy and trade.

Through the portraits, the exhibition explores this torrid period of religious conflict and political intrigue, the legacies of which continue to reverberate through contemporary British life. It features vivid likenesses of many of the most significant figures of the time, including Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Cranmer, Thomas More, William Cecil and Thomas Cromwell, whose fame has recently been revived by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy.

Holburne Curator Monserrat Pis Marcos says, “This is an unmissable opportunity to get up close and personal with a selection of stunning portraits of some of the most influential characters of the Tudor era and learn about the lights and shadows of their personal lives, as well as their connections at home and abroad.”

Beginning with the oldest painting in the National Portrait Gallery’s ’s Collection, a 1505 portrait of the first Tudor king, Henry VII, the exhibition follows the family’s successive generations and their courtiers, including the Protestant spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham (c.1585) and Nicholas Hilliard’s dashing miniature portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh (c.1585).

The quality of the brushwork and sense of realism is palpable in many of the portraits. From the grim, steely ruthlessness of Sir Thomas Cromwell (after Hans Holbein the Younger, early 17th-century) to a fresh-faced Mary, Queen of Scots (c.1560–1592), contrasted with a more careworn image of her after she had been a prisoner for ten years (inscribed 1578). The two portraits are particularly intriguing due to Mary’s personal history. She ruled Scotland as queen-regnant from 1561 to 1568 but spent the rest of her life in England as a political prisoner, until her execution in 1587. While imprisoned, she sat for Nicholas Hilliard in 1578 and that became the basis of almost all her subsequent images. After her death and that of Elizabeth I, Mary’s son, James I – who had been ruling Scotland as James VI since 1567 - accessed the English throne in 1603 and commissioned romanticised portraits of his mother, which effectively served as icons to her memory.

Indeed, as Monserrat Pis Marcos observes, the Tudors were both great innovators and instigators of royal iconography: “Royal portraiture significantly developed and flourished under Henry VIII. If you compare the portrait of his father and the early portrait of Henry as he was about to turn 30, and you place them alongside the Whitehall mural or the Victoria Art Gallery, Bath’s portrait, which was based on the same composition, you will see that there is a radical change in the king’s attitude, in the way he presents himself before his subjects.”




She adds: “The turmoil caused by the Reformation resulted in an increased demand for paintings of the monarch, so his portraits were copied and circulated in an unprecedented manner. Elizabeth I and those closest to her also realised the power of portraiture to convey different messages so, as her reign progressed, she moved away from portrait types championed by her predecessors, as these were closely associated with marriage and dynastic continuity through childbirth, opting instead for being represented in other roles such as goddess, empress and mother to the nation.”

Queen Elizabeth I may have been further idealised or imagined due to her notorious reluctance to sit for portraits, prompting artists to base their likenesses on pre-existing examples. Visitors will be able to see for themselves why the National Portrait Gallery’s ‘Darnley’ portrait became so important, as it is one of the few of Elizabeth that was almost certainly painted from life. The pattern for the queen's face was repeated throughout the remainder of her reign.

The 'Darnley portrait' – so called after a previous owner – shows the Queen looking cold, haughty and imperious, wearing a rather masculine doublet with a lace ruff collar, a double string of pearls looped around her neck and carrying an ostrich-feather fan. The portrait may have been painted by a Flemish artist, perhaps one visiting England for a short period. It is more lifelike than some of the later portraits, which did much to establish the idea of an ageless Virgin Queen.

This extraordinary exhibition raises questions about the art of portraiture and addresses issues that erupted during the tempestuous sixteenth century and continue to shape our lives today.

The Tudors: Passion, Power and Politics invites viewers to wonder how important is it to capture the exactitude of someone’s features in an image of someone who aspires to be a model for an entire kingdom? One purpose of Tudor portraits was to instill a sense of destiny and lineage. The faces that return our gaze presented royal viewers with the likenesses of their forebears, to remind them of their royal blood and that they were born to do great things.

Portraits also played an important part in marriage arrangements. When Henry VII was searching across Europe for a second wife, he requested a portrait of Joanna of Naples in secret because “if she proved to be ugly and not handsome the King of England would not have her for all the treasures in the world; nor would he dare to take her, as the English think so much about their personal appearance”.

“If you think of it, basically the fate of an entire dynasty could be sealed by one bad portrait, so this gives you an idea of why Henry VIII reportedly said: ‘I can make seven earls (if it pleased me) from seven peasants – but I could not make one Holbein, or so excellent an artist, out of seven earls’, Monserrat observes.

As the exhibition further demonstrates, under the Tudors portraiture was an effective form of propaganda, as Pis Marcos explains: “Commissioning a portrait of the monarch to hang in your stately home in the countryside showed your loyalty to the ruler, or your adherence to one cause or other and, in Tudor times, England was not short of causes to pledge allegiance to. This explains the portrait inflation and how the wealthy and powerful could use portraits to project an image of themselves onto others. Much as we use social platforms today, to present a certain image of ourselves, whether it be real or not.”

In addition to considering the way portraiture worked in the sixteenth century, in presenting the leading figures of that time, The Tudors: Passion, Power and Politics will highlight the roots of issues that continue to shape our lives today: tensions between Roman Catholics and Protestants that derived from the Reformation; alliances and disputes between England and continental Europe; the trans-Atlantic trade and piracy that characterised the early development of the British empire.

Chris Stephens, Director of the Holburne Museum says: “Our 2022 season begins with this fantastic exhibition. Portraiture is one of the mainstays of the Holburne’s collection, so it is entirely fitting that we should mount an exhibition that explores artists’ depictions of the key players in the drama of dynastic, political, and religious conflict enacted on both a national and international stage. We aim to draw out the relevance of the art of the past to our present moment and, though five hundred years old, through the story of the Tudors we learn a lot about Britain today.”

Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director, National Portrait Gallery, London said: “We are delighted to be partnering with our colleagues in Bath and Liverpool to create this once in a generation opportunity to see some of the nation’s best-loved portraits exhibited together outside of London. Through all our projects and partnerships, we hope to be able to share our Collection with new and different audiences across the UK, some of whom may not have had the opportunity to visit the Gallery in London.”