What To Expect From Six Lives At The National Portrait Gallery

Six Lives sheds new light on the women who shaped Tudor history, says Ed Vaizey.

Six Lives: The Stories of Henry VIII’s Queens, National Portrait Gallery

Outside the Chamber of the House of Lords is a room called the Prince’s Chamber, where peers gather before debates start. Unlike the rest of the Lords, which is carpeted in deep red, this room has a fetching royal blue underfoot.

For reasons that I have never worked out, Henry VIII and his six wives dominate the room, with their portraits above the doors reaching to the ceiling. Well, it’s kind of a Tudor homage I guess. The Stuarts get the Peer’s Corridor. I think Elizabeth I is also in the Prince’s Chamber, and some tapestries of the Armada. Apparently, all the portraits were painted by students of the Royal College of Art in the 1850s, after Pugin had set out the design of the room.

All this is a long way of saying if you can’t get into the Prince’s Chamber to see some pretty undistinguished paintings of a Tudor monarch and his wives, then why not pop down to the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) to see some Tudor paintings by Hans Holbein the Younger and contemporary photography by Hiroshi Sugimoto. These two artists, separated by half a globe and half a millennium, meet in the NPG’s first exhibition of historic portraiture since reopening, presenting a study of the lives and afterlives of the six women who married Henry VIII.

According to the NPG, Six Lives: The Stories of Henry VIII’s Queens will ‘chronicle the representation of Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Katherine Parr throughout history and popular culture in the centuries since they lived. As a frequent source of fascination, the stories of the six women have repeatedly inspired writers and artists of all kinds to attempt to uncover the “truth” of their lives: their characters, their appearance and their relationships. From historic paintings, drawings and ephemera, to contemporary photography, costume and film, the exhibition draws upon a wealth of factual and fictional materials to present the life, legacy and portrayal of six women who forever changed the landscape of English history.’

It’s clear why Hiroshi Sugimoto is coming along for the ride. He is, without question, one of Japan’s most renowned photographers and architects. And his work blurs the line between painting and photography. Now in his mid-70s, he has made significant contributions to the world of art and design. For Six Lives, the curators have called in his 1999 portrait series of the six wives, taken of waxworks at Madame Tussauds, which explore the eerie tension between what is real and what is imagined.

We are all more than familiar with Henry VIII and his six wives, and in this exhibition we will see not just familiar faces but familiar painters. But it’s a clever play to get a great modern artist like Sugimoto – and one that is not European – to bring these great ladies alive with his talent and modern perspective.

SEE IT

Six Lives: The Stories of Henry VIII’s Queens is at the National Portrait Gallery from 20 June–8 September 2024. Tickets are £21 or £5 for visitors aged 25 and under on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Members visit for free. npg.org.uk