Lady Jane Grey

The National Portrait Gallery puts on great small exhibitions which are free and are ideal for a quick lunch-time or pre-meeting visit, and which, despite their smallness, are often fascinating in the insight they can offer. The other day I went to see their current exhibition on Lady Jane Grey in Room 16, the nine-day queen manipulated by political forces and executed after she was removed from the throne (more biographical info available here). The exhibition notes explain that in fact there is no verified portrait of Lady Jane during her lifetime, and many of those attributed are in fact of other people, such as Catherine Parr and even Elizabeth I. Yet despite this, Lady Jane has passed into mythology, and it is this mythologising that has led to the number of images of her we now have. The exhibition explains why: particularly in the Catholic/Protestant battle for the throne, Lady Jane came to be seen as a Protestant martyr, embodying values of passive femininity as well as a high degree of education and piety.
The most influential portrait of her is taken from the “Heroologia”, Henry Holland’s book of English Protestant heroes (1620), though this image is based on Catherine Parr. This image, which depicts a passive, pious-looking woman, was re-used in increasingly emotive and dramatic depictions, and led to the explosion of interest in her in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Certainly the Victorians produced romanticised images with elaborate versions of Tudor dress (which are quite at odds with contemporary descriptions of Lady Jane’s usual choice of attire), and envisage her as an idealised version of a martyred woman (with a hint of a simper). In many ways the best image is from Robert Sienler (1795-1865), which gives her a firm and determined face, with distinctive clothing and more character than most.
Between 1827 and 1877, 24 portraits of Lady Jane were exhibited at the Royal Academy (no doubt even more were actually painted), as anti-Catholic feeling grew in Britian and this submissive, patriotic woman came to be seen as a symbol of ideal English womanhood. Of course, this interest in her says a lot about the times in which the portraits were painted and virtually nothing at all about Lady Jane herself, who remains more or less an enigma. I wonder if the last pictures of her in the exhibition, in the mid-19th century, in which she is shown in a prison, threatened by a guard brandishing a crucifix, with the implication that she must choose between death and conversion to Catholicism, owe much to the perceived threat of Catholicism to which Gothic literature owes so much.
The most famous portrait of her is of course Delaroche’s “Execution of Lady Jane Grey” (1833), right, which is not part of this exhibition but can be seen in the National Gallery and is also well worth a look. Like so many aspects of English history (and indeed any other history), sometimes what actually happened is not so important as how it was interpreted and mythologised. This exhibition is just another reminder of that.

From February 24th the National Gallery will be holding an exhibition on Delaroche’s Lady Jane.

Wyndham Lewis Portraits

In between getting Russian visas yesterday, I popped into the National Portrait Gallery to have a look at the Wyndham Lewis portraits exhibition. I know more about Lewis’s writing than about his painting, due to a friend whose MA thesis was on Blast, but since he demonstrated Vorticism through his art as well as his writing, I thought it would be an interesting experience, and so it was. Firstly, the unnerving thing about it is when you realise you’re standing in a room full of portraits, and none of them are smiling. Many also avoid your gaze. I feel – though I may be wrong – that Lewis may have liked painting people, but he didn’t actually have much time for humanity in general. The second unnerving thing was how many of the male portraits looked like my head of department, but fortunately that shouldn’t affect too many other people….
Lewis’s most famous portrait, of TS Eliot (1938), above, is of a “man haunted by a vision” – or that’s what Lewis said of his later portrait of Eliot, but it seems truer of this one. Like Eliot, Lewis felt he had suffered for his art, perhaps sacrificing too much of his personal life to his creative vision. Actually, in the portraits of Froanna, his wife, one wonders if it was her that was sacrificed, too. The portraits are beautiful, often in warm colours (Lewis liked monochromatic painting), domestic, and seem tenderly done, but she looks infinitely sad.
I was interested by Portrait of the Artist as the Painter Raphael, particularly because post-war artists were urged to return to a classical style, which Lewis does ironically, only with the title, while the image itself is modelled on one of Shakespeare. His skill seems so unique, though – there is nothing realist about these figures, yet one feels like reaching out and touching them. Cubist influences are evident throughout, particularly in the chiselled noses and foreheads, as though Lewis’s role was not so much to paint them as to carve them out of stone. It’s suggested that Cubism is a “radical simplification” of what we see, but in some ways it seems infinitely more complicated, as though these shapes out of which people and things are created are endless, going on forever into a background we can’t focus on.
Perhaps one of my favourite portraits here was that of Edith Sitwell (left). She is elegant, lean, poised – and almost dehumanised (and Lewis left out her hands, which she saw as her only redeeming feature.) She, too, seems sad, lonely even, in this surprisingly detailed background (for Lewis). But it’s also the essence of what we expect of a 1920s writer (I think) – it plays to the image of celebrated writers, alone, sombre, brooding. I think Lewis liked to play with celebrity; he certainly played with his own image enough, with his obsessive hat-wearing and portraying himself as the “Enemy”.
Perhaps his most sympathetic portrait is that of Mary Webb, the novelist, whose physical defects he gently disguises, while the tangled profusion of her hair seems to reflect her interest in the natural world in her novels. One of the least sympathetic, however, seems to be of Virginia Woolf (though no-one is sure that this is who it is). Lewis despised the Bloomsbury Group, and described A Room of One’s Own as a “feminist fairytale” – and Woolf, if it is she, seems to be a spectre haunting that fairyland, if his portrait is anything to go by! But then, he was a man of strong opinions, and not afraid to show it, which might not have made him pleasant, but it does make him interesting.

A Room of One’s Own

Women Writers at the National Portrait Gallery

9 December 2006 – 17 June 2007, Room 31 – 20th Century Galleries. Showcase display.

This is possibly the smallest exhibition I’ve ever gone out of my way to see, but I’m glad I did, because it got me thinking about things. It’s one case, with no more than 25 (at a guess) portraits, but there’s a lot of food for thought there. The exhibition is all photographs, all black and white, and all very evocative. The most striking thing about it is that if, like me, you write, you look at these women and wonder what there is that’s like you, and what’s different. This is, of course, both dangerous and utterly pointless, since these immaculate women in (usually)carefully posed photographs from the early 20th century are worlds away from us – much further, of course, in person than in their work, which remains relevant and is enduringly enjoyed. Nowadays writers are stereotyped as people who sit at their computer in their pyjamas all day; then, they seemed to have beautiful studies in country houses and always, always wore lipstick.

There’s a strong feeling in me that what they looked like shouldn’t matter. Male or female, rotund, glamorous, hairy, whatever, it doesn’t matter; what matters is their writing, which comes from inside. (Although that leads me to another question I wonder about – how does our outward appearance – pretty child, ugly duckling, spotty teenager, etc, affect our character? Haven’t got time for that now though.) But if the external doesn’t matter, at least as far as writers are concerned, then why do we look? Why do we turn to the back inside cover of a novel to look at the picture of the author? And why, for that matter, would anyone go to this exhibition? Perhaps we put too much emphasis on appearance. Although – a slightly exonerating factor – I at least like the period detail, the immaculate desks and the glamorous women writers, because to me that’s aspirational. It would be interesting to know how many people who went to see this exhibition were writers themselves. I suppose the other appeal is how independent they are. Writers, it seems, are never photographed with anyone else. And given that for many of these women, independence was the point, it’s highlighted here. (Ivy Compton Burnett is quoted as saying that writing flourished because of: ‘Being single, and having some money, and having the time – having no men, you see’.)

The other thing that struck me is their eyes – or, more specifically, their gazes. The situation of women in the world has often been defined by the (male) gaze, and the relative aspects of womanhood that appear through the gaze. For writers, this is, arguably, intensified. Writers both divert the public gaze from themselves, deflecting it with words, hiding behind their writing. Equally, though, they are opening up to the gaze, becoming public figures (hence these photographs) and revealing themselves through their writing. So what happens to their own gaze? The all-seeing eye of the writer is fanously feared; they scrutinise, dissect with their eyes, minutely examine. Many of the writers featured in this exhibition represent this, with their challenging gaze piercing the camera (for example, Daphne du Maurier).

Some look just slightly away, like Dodie Smith. And aren’t you thinking, “Does she look like the kind of woman who wrote 101 Dalmations and I Capture the Castle?” I think so, but it’s irrelevant, because she did.

Others appear reticent, however, gazing down or away from the camera, evidently lost in writerly reverie, but perhaps simply being evasive. After all, if you create worlds in books for the public to consume, why would you want to give them any more of yourself? Why not be evasive, not allowing the world any more of you than they have? If the eyes are a window of the soul, maybe that soul needs to be cloistered sometimes. Writers are often very private people, they say, so why expect anything other than a challenging belligerence or an evasive reserve? I think we expect too much of our writers; they are, as these pictures show, only human after all – and perhaps that’s what we need to see.