- Hello, everyone, and welcome to the National Portrait Gallery. Thank you so much for joining us for this very exciting In Conversation today where we'll be introducing our brand-new exhibition, "Shakespeare to Winehouse, Icons from the National Portrait Gallery in London" to you. My name's Gill, I'm very excited to be managing some of the back end and the hosting of this particular programme and introducing our speaker to you today. We also have monitoring our chat, Alana, who is monitoring the Zoom chat and also the comments on Facebook. We do like our programmes to be as interactive as possible, so if you have any comments or observations throughout the course of the programme, please feel free to pop them in the chat, and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Hector and Robert are also our technical wizards who are hanging out behind the scenes, and if there's anything we can do today to make the experience of this programme better for you, please feel free to let us know in the chat, and we'll do our very best to make sure it's as comfortable and as interesting as possible. The National Portrait Gallery is on the lands of the Ngambri and the Ngunnawal peoples, and I'd like to pay my respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging. I'd like to extend a warm welcome to any First Nations people who are joining us for this programme today as well. Well, I am extremely excited to be able to introduce our speaker, Jo Gilmour, to you today for a couple of reasons. One of the reasons is that the "Shakespeare to Winehouse" exhibition from the National Portrait Gallery in London is some of the most iconic works held by that collection. Now, that collection is massive compared to ours. They have over 215,000 portraits in their collection, and they've also been around for a lot longer than the National Portrait Gallery here in Canberra, so much so that I did a little bit of a nerdy look into the history of the National Portrait Gallery of Canberra. And I went through every single portrait that we've ever had in our building from the beginning, from the first day that the National Portrait Gallery opened, whether they were on loan to us from other institutions or whether they were our own collection. And this exhibition, you'd think I'd be excited about the big contemporary names, the Bowies and Winehouses, and I am, but this collection, this exhibition is old. And so we have the oldest works we have ever had in our building as well as some of the amazing contemporary portraits from the National Portrait Gallery of London, so much so that some of the works in this particular exhibition are 200 years older than any other portrait that has ever been on display on our walls. So that's excitement number one. Excitement number two is that Joanna Gilmour, our curator of collections and research, is also an old expert. She is a historic portrait nerd, and I'm sure she wouldn't mind me describing her as that. She has the most amazing knowledge about portraits, vintage portraits. So I can't wait to hear what she has to say about the selection that she's made to share with you today. And probably reason number three, actually, if I'm gonna throw one out there, is that the portraits that she has selected happen to be of women, and I suppose one of the misconceptions about portrait galleries, particularly if we're talking about old portraits, is that they're often of old white men. So I'm really happy that Jo has picked this incredible selection of powerful and intriguing women to tell you some of these stories. So without further ado, I'd like to hand over to our powerful and intriguing woman, Joanna Gilmour, take it away, Jo.
- I'm not sure I warrant that introduction, Gill, but thank you very much. And I think everyone will probably learn very quickly that my knowledge of old portraits is about 300 years younger than the oldest work in this exhibition. So while it's been really wonderful to have this exhibition here, and it is really wonderful to have this exhibition here, we have all been to doing a lot of brushing up on portraits from the 16th and 17th centuries, because as Gill explained, we've never had that sort of material on display here before, so it's really exciting for a number of reasons. I'd like also to acknowledge the traditional owners, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples who are the traditional custodians of Canberra, the Canberra region, and who've been telling their stories on this country, their country for thousands of generations. And I'd also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of all of the parts of the continent that you might be Zooming in from today. I'm also really happy to be sort of launching this digital programme of events associated with the "Shakespeare to Winehouse" exhibition, which opened here on the weekend. It's an absolutely fantastic exhibition of 84 portraits from the National Portrait Gallery in London that encompasses everything from 16th century panel paintings right up to 21st century digital and computer-generated artworks. And also of course, which it goes without saying, and as the title of the exhibition probably suggests, it includes images of people who have been shaping society and culture since the 1550s right up until now, and not just British society and culture, I might add, but society and culture worldwide and society and culture globally. And although from the outside, it might seem like it's just an exhibition of legendary names and famous faces, at its core, "Shakespeare to Winehouse" is an exhibition, I think, that's about creativity. It's an exhibition first and foremost, that's about art history and specifically the art of portraiture and the way that artists across a span of almost 500 years have been dealing with questions of how to capture or convey things like power, identity, love, loss, selfhood, and fame. So it's also very much an exhibition that takes as its starting point in a way, as NPG London does, this idea that there's more to portraiture than just a transcription or an accurate record of what someone looks like. And for centuries, for as long as artists have been making portraits, artists have been tackling that issue of how do you create a portrait that isn't just a record of what someone looks like but which really tries and captures, capture in a compelling way who that person is, what is it about them that makes them extraordinary or unique or interesting. So in that, I guess you'd say it's an exhibition that is also about what distinguishes portraiture from other visual arts genres. And for that reason, it's also very much an exhibition that's about all sorts of human characteristics and experiences, and to borrow that line from Hamlet, it's an exhibition that really is about the "thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to" and how those experiences or those natural shocks are relatable and resonant and meaningful, no matter what century we're living in and no matter what century these portraits were created in. And as Gill explained, with that in mind, what I've prepared for this discussion this afternoon is a sample of stories from across the almost six centuries represented in "Shakespeare to Winehouse," which I hope will both give you a sense of the scope of the exhibition as well as the way that it's been structured. And I think that's really sort of a key thing to remember about "Shakespeare to Winehouse." And any of you who've been to NPG London before, and for me, as someone who visits the NPG every time I'm in London, it's literally one of my favourite museums in the world, I think what's especially interesting about the "Shakespeare to Winehouse" exhibition is that the works in it aren't arranged chronologically. So ordinarily, if you go to London, you go to the NPG, their permanent collection displays are ordered chronologically, and you get this wonderful sort of visual timeline of British history through the faces of the people who have shaped it. But in this exhibition, rather than grouping things chronologically or stylistically, the curators who were lucky enough to put it together have grouped all of the works according to a series of themes that are all intrinsic to portraiture and that persist in portraits from the 16th century right up until contemporary times. And that in a way enables you to see the way that portraits, even though they might've been created centuries apart or they might be of like diametrically opposite people in all sorts of ways, they're still able to sort of share the same language or be in conversation with each other and for that conversation to somehow make sense. So it's a really refreshing and wonderful way to see in NPG London's collection displayed. And secondly, as we've recently celebrated International Women's Day, and being someone who thinks it should be International Women's Day every day, I've chosen seven portraits of great women that are in "Shakespeare to Winehouse." There are lots of really good portraits of women in this show. I've just selected seven of them. And I thought I'd talk about those portraits with reference to how their subjects exemplify a certain group of characteristics, those characteristics being wit, creativity, authority, strength, adaptability, courage, and wisdom, all of which you might be inclined to think of as the type of characteristics that, historically speaking at least, weren't always a feature or a focus of portraits of women. So with that, Hector, we'll have a look at the first slide, please. And this is, for me, a lady who exemplifies wit. Her name's Nell Gwyn. The painting is by an artist named Simon Verelst, painted around 1680. And I think, I mean, she's fantastic for a lot of reasons, but as an artwork, I think this work is a particularly fantastic, another really great feature about this exhibition is that it includes a number of really sort of rich and telling examples of the way that portraits evidence or give you a lens onto the social and historical conditions that were in operation at the time that portraits were created. Or I guess the other way to look at it is the fantastic lenses onto the way that different social or historical or political factors sort of come through in artworks, sometimes without even realising it. And this is perhaps particularly true of portraiture, I'd argue, and that's partly because of the individual biographies or stories that are represented in portraits, but also because of what portraits tell you about changing ideas about the nature and the purpose of art and the way that the actual nature of representation and styles of representation were very much influenced by those kind of bigger-picture or bigger external factors as well. And in saying that, I'm thinking in particular of many of the historical works in the exhibition. So there's some fantastic panel paintings, which tell you a lot about the way artists would've had to operate during the Protestant Reformation, for example, and how religious factors influenced the representation of individuals. And then you've got people like Nell Gwyn. So this is a painting from the 17th century, which to me is incredibly illustrative of the time in which she lived. So for me, this is a wonderful sort of Restoration artefact. So Nell, among other things, she was one of the first women to become, to be a professional actor in England. And for those of you who are familiar with English history, you'll know that in late 1640s, King Charles I first was executed. That was followed by a period of just over a decade called the in Interregnum when Oliver Cromwell, who's also in the exhibition, by the way, was in charge. And it was a very sort of puritanical Protestant regime, and things like theatre and music and poetry and art and all of these things that were, in the puritanical way of thinking, were considered idolatrous or sinful or what have you were very much curtailed. When Charles II is restored to the throne in 1660, all of those things come back with a vengeance, and Nell is one of the performers, one of the creative people who was really able to, I guess, make the most of the re-flowering of theatre and art and so forth, all of those sinful things in the Restoration, in the early Restoration period. Her real name was Eleanor Gwyn, but she's known as Nell. She was born around about 1651. And whereas a lot of the facts about Nell's early life are somewhat unclear or subject to debate, it would seem that for whatever reason, there was some sort of a connection between Nell's family and the family of a man who owned a theatre called the King's Theatre in London in the 1660s, and by the age of about 12 or 13, Nell is thought to have been working at that theatre. She used to shuck oysters, and she would sell oranges to the patrons of the theatre. And then by the time she was 15 or 16, it seems that she had graduated from shucking oysters and selling oranges to actually performing on the stage. and the very famous English diarist, Samuel Pepys, he writes, for example, in December 1666, that he had seen Nell perform at the King's Theatre. He called her "pretty, witty Nell," and he also recorded that he thought Nell wasn't so good in serious roles, but in comic roles, or what Pepys called mad parts, Nell was beyond imitation. And then of course, just a year or two after Pepys had first seen one of Nell's stage performances, she reached a new level of notoriety when she and King Charles II became lovers, and unsurprisingly, it's that aspect of her story which history has tended to focus on. And more often than not, if you come across a reference to Nell Gwyn, it'll be a description of her as the mistress of Charles II, as if that's her sort of only claim to fame. And apart from the fact that that description very much downplays the significance and the longevity of her relationship with Charles II, they had two children together. He purchased a very fancy house for her on Pall Mall, and also he made sure that she would be looked after financially after his death. So she wasn't just a bit on the side or a fling. This was a, you know, substantial relationship. That sort of characterization of her as just a mistress also neglects to mention her significance, not just as an actor, but as a woman who used her considerable wit and worldliness to make a life for herself at court and in this sort of sphere of life which she wouldn't, she had, you know, she was very, from very humble origins, and she wouldn't ordinarily have had access to that sort lifestyle unless she made it for herself. And what I love, I think, about this particular painting is that it's a wonderful example of her not being shamed by who she was, not being shamed by what she did and how she became famous. And indeed, it's a very early example, I'd argue, of an actor using her image to very much kind of promote her own notoriety and promote her own fame and establish herself as a celebrity. So you'll see, she's very saucily dressed. She's basically in her underwear. People like Samuel Pepys, who's Pepys by name, peeps by nature from the sounds of it, he records being invited to Nell's dressing room, being invited backstage to see her dress in a costume for her different roles. So she was someone who very much knew her worth as a rather sort of salacious and saucy and gorgeous individual and who very much played up to of that sort of degree of notoriety. And I think you get a wonderful sense of that from this portrait, those ridiculously rosy cheeks, the very racily exposed breast. It's just fantastic, and also very interestingly, the pearl necklace, bearing in mind that pearls are, of course, a symbol of virginity and purity. We'll talk a little bit more about that in relation to Elizabeth I when we see her. So yeah, fabulous subject, fabulous object, and a really great sort of synthesis, I think, of yeah, all of those things about portraiture that distinguish it from other art forms. So that's enough about Nell. Should we go to the next slide, Hector? Okay, so apologies to everyone who's already heard me bang on about this picture, but it's probably, it is easily my favourite work in the exhibition. The subjects are the Bronte sisters. So we've got Anne on the left, Emily in the middle, and Charlotte on the right. And if you look closely at the picture, you can probably see a kind of a shadowy figure in the background there between Emily and Charlotte. And that is thought, it is believed now to be a painted-over self-portrait of the artist who created this work, which was the sisters' brother, Branwell Bronte. He was about 17 years old when he painted it. It was painted, we think, around 1834. And sort of to give you an idea of the sitters at the time, Anne would've been maybe about 14 or 15 when it was painted. Emily would've been about 16, and Charlotte would've been about 18. So it's a number of years before they published the poetry and subsequently the novels that have made them some of the most celebrated writers in the English language, quite rightfully. But I think the other thing that you can't help but notice about the portrait is the condition that it's in. And that's because after it was painted, it sort of went missing for a number of years, until 1914, in fact. So what's that, 70 years or 80? My maths is terrible. That's why I work in an gallery. But yeah, so it was gone missing, it was believed lost, and then in 1914, it was found folded up on top of a cupboard in the family of Charlotte Bronte's husband's second wife. It's a long explanation, which I won't go into, but basically, the portrait was located in 1914, which is when NPG London acquired it and made what must've been for the time an incredibly radical decision not to conserve the work, as you can see. You look at this work, you can see there's that massive hole where the paint has just sort of completely flaked off in the very sort of centre of the composition. There's the crease marks down the centre and across the middle. There's other sort of sections where the paint's fallen off. When you see the work in the exhibition, you can't sort of see it from this reproduction, but the work has obviously been taken off its original stretcher at some point, and you can see the sort of rusty hole, sort of nail holes where it would originally have been attached to its stretcher. So it really is this very kind of warts-and-all object, and for conservators in 1914 not to make the decision to make it look all, sort of patch it up and make it look sort of glorious and beautiful, bearing in mind that by 1914, the Bronte sisters were recognised for the significance of their achievements, unlike during their lifetimes, their short lifetimes, it's really quite interesting certainly from a museum and sort of conservation perspective that they didn't make the decision to tart it up and, you know, make it look like a sort of a beautiful grand portrait. So there's all sorts of things going on with this work and all sorts of reasons why I love it so much, not the least of which is that it's a work which very much kind of refutes the perception that you might have in your head when you hear the words National Portrait Gallery. It's actually a work that demonstrates that, you know, just because something isn't painted by a professional artist and doesn't look as if it's in particularly great condition doesn't make it a really good work. And in fact, whenever I look at this work and I, this is like, this is my nerd contribution. Gill's told you about hers. This is my nerd contribution. When I look at this work, I actually think of a line from "Jane Eyre," possibly my favourite novel, but that varies. Next week I'll have a different favourite 19th century novel, but today it's "Jane Eyre." And I look at this work and I hear these words from "Jane Eyre," which I'll read to you. And for anyone who hasn't read the book, this is kind of a point in the novel where Jane, who's obviously the main character, is remonstrating with Mr. Rochester, who's the kind of love interest, I suppose. She has just found out this kind of cataclysmic secret about Rochester, and it's a very satisfying bit of the book where she's giving him a piece of her mind and basically telling Mr. Rochester, you can shove your marriage proposal, you can finish that sentence if you like, and yeah, telling him what she really thinks. And Jane says to Rochester, hang on, da-da-da, just trying to find it, okay. "Do you think because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong. I have as much soul as you and full as much heart." And the reason why that makes me think of this work or the reason why that quote, I think, is so relevant to this painting is that you have so much more soul and so much more heart in this picture of the Brontes than it, than you would have had it been painted by, you know, a Royal Academy artist and had it, if it was big and if it wasn't damaged and if it was in a beautiful gold frame and so forth. There's this wonderful sort of immediacy and a sense of connection and a sense of intimacy about this work that you literally don't get from works which on the face of it are a lot more accomplished. And the other wonderful thing, of course, to bear in mind is, or to remember, is that it was painted by Charlotte and Emily and Anne's brother, so it's a very personal work. This is not an artist trying to make his sitters look something like other than they were. This is an artist painting his loved ones, his sisters, as he saw them. And so it's a really, a beautiful work for that reason, a really powerful work for that reason. And the other thing, of course, is that I think it tells you a lot about the sort of conditions that the Bronte sisters lived in and worked in. You know, they weren't women who had access to the sort of educations and so forth that other people might've had, yet even with their sort of, you know, relatively kind of limited means, they were still able to educate themselves to this incredible degree and come up with these fantastically imaginative fictional worlds. They were women who knew that, you know, they didn't have the money to attract a great husband, a rich husband, for example, and that they would have to make their living through their own creativity and through their own wit as well, a little bit like Nell Gwyn. And what I think you get from this portrait is also a great sort of sense of that adaptability and that sort of self-sustainability and that sort of drive that they must've had to overcome everything that they did in order to be able to publish their works and become the wonderful novelists and writers that they were. So they're my, they're the creativity side of today's story. And I think we can go onto the next one, thanks, Hector. So "Queen Elizabeth I," painted in 1575, around about 1575, and attributed in part to an artist named Nicholas Hilliard, who was a court painter in the Elizabethan era. He's known in particular for producing a lot of miniatures, very detailed miniatures of Elizabeth I, which were kept and carried by her supporters as a kind of a sign of allegiance to her. And I've included "Queen Elizabeth I" partly because it's an absolutely fabulous portrait, but I think it's also a really fabulous image of authority, which is not something, I suppose, we associate with portraits of women, particularly not from the 16th century. And once again, she's a bit like the Brontes in that you, there's so much you can say about this work just from the nature of its execution. But I think in sort of a, to do a kind of an iconographical reading of it, it's really important to sort of notice some of the symbolism and some of the sort of characteristics that the artist has used to convey her image. And if you zoom in on the portrait, which I think we can do, can't we? Yeah, great. Thanks, Hector. So that's a detail of the sort of centre of the composition. Firstly, the work is nicknamed the "Phoenix" portrait, and you can see just above Queen Elizabeth's hand, there's a sort of a red-and-gold jewel in the shape of the phoenix. And also if you look at very closely at that sort of embroidered gold pattern on her gown, you can see that that is in the shape of a phoenix as well. So you've got the leaves or what look like leaves actually forming the shape of the tail and the wings and the sort of other piece of foliage sort of vaguely evoking the phoenix's head. And the phoenix, of course, was a sign of rebirth and regeneration. The other really amazing feature about this portrait is all of those pearls. I don't know how many pearls are actually in this portrait. I'm gonna have to go up and count them because it's quite extraordinary. There are hundreds of these perfectly delineated pearls in this work, and they look three-dimensional, and the whole thing just glows. It's so extraordinarily painted. And in fact, it glows and looks fresher than works in the exhibition which are much, much younger than this particular painting. But the pearls are particularly pertinent as well. As I mentioned, I think in relation to Nell Gwyn, pearls were a symbol of virginity and purity, and this work, painted in the 1570s, by which time Queen Elizabeth I would've been in her 40s, all sort of talk of her finding a husband and having an heir, et cetera, has sort of gone out the window, and she declares herself to be the mother of her people, devoted to her people, and the Virgin Queen. And very interestingly at that point, that's when artists started appropriating a lot of symbols and imagery that would ordinarily have been used for depictions of the Virgin Mary and applying them to the Virgin Queen, and the pearls are a really sort of fantastic example of that, I think. And of course the other thing that you can see very obviously in this detail is the Tudor rose that she's holding and also the sort of brooch just below her neck, which is also in the form of a rose, that, of course, being the symbol of the House of Tudor. Elizabeth I, of course, was Henry VIII's daughter. So it's a wonderfully defiant picture. It's a wonderfully authoritative picture. And if you bear in mind that this is made only a few years after Elizabeth I had been officially excommunicated by the pope, which meant that the pope had pretty much called on all good Catholics to condemn her as a heretic and plot against her and all of these sorts of things, the fact that she sees, she's perfectly confident in her own authority and perfectly fine with showing herself as this authoritative, powerful, virginal woman, I think it's, it makes it a really defiant portrait. It's really powerful, it's really strong, and yeah, easily one of the greatest things in the exhibition. It's a real treat to have it here. Have we had enough of Elizabeth I?
- Yeah. We might move on to the next slide. Thanks, Hector. Oh God, this is another really fantastic one. And I'm probably, I hope I'm not going over time, so.
- One o'clock, okay, we've still got time. One of the sections of the exhibition is all on self-portraiture, a really fantastic section of the show. I mean, they're all pretty great, but the self-portraits I think are particularly fantastic. It's got everything from a beautiful self-portrait by Sir Anthony van Dyck which was painted about 1640 right up until, you know, the early 2000s. There's a death mask by Tracey Emin, which is really wonderful, and also this fantastic portrait, self-portrait in the form of a map by the British artist Grayson Perry, which is, you know, so you get this incredible span of self-portraiture and this incredible span of notions about how to represent the self. This particular work is by, a self-portrait by an artist named Angelica Kauffmann. She's Swiss by birth. She was born in Switzerland in 1741. Luckily for Angelica, her dad was an artist who encouraged her in that pursuit. She went to Italy with her father, trained in painting with him in Italy, and it was while she was in Italy that she became very much influenced by the sort of neoclassical style, which I think you can very much see in this self-portrait. She's wearing that very sort of Grecian classical dress. And she made lots of self-portraits, and in almost all of them, she very much sort of invokes the muse, the classical appearance and depicts herself in this sort of Grecian or classical gown. She started working in England, in London, in about 1766 after she'd been in Italy and finished her training. And she was a specialist in portraiture, as you can probably tell, and also in sort of neoclassical history painting. And two years after she moved to London, she and an artist named Mary Moser became the only two female founding members of the Royal Academy. The Royal Academy was established in 1768 after a number of leading artists had petitioned King George III asking him to establish a national art training school that had sort of Royal endorsement. And while it might be surprising to learn, as I was surprised to learn, that there were two women admitted as founding members of the Royal Academy in the 1760s. When you look into it further, you realise that it's possible to be deceived into thinking that their admittance to the Royal Academy was a reflection of Kauffmann and Moser's status, because unfortunately, that's not the case. Though they were admitted to the Royal Academy, they were very much not on an equal footing with their male peers and male counterparts. And I'd argue that that's something that's, it's alluded to not only in this work but in the number of other self-portraits that Angelica Kauffmann made. In itself, the fact that Kauffmann painted self-portraits is very telling. So there's this long-held idea, of course, that artists, or one of the reasons why artists paint or create self-portraits is that artists make very reliable models, and you're always dependable and reliable and always available to yourself. And I think that's probably even more the case when you're talking about someone like Angelica Kauffmann and a number of her contemporaries, because her self-portraits are actually, to me, I think, a signal that as a woman, she was at a major disadvantage. And even though she was admitted to the Royal Academy in 1768, she wouldn't have had the same access as her male artists, male counterparts, to things like education and training and to fundamental requirements of art training, such as to nude live models, male models in particular, and nor would it have been considered appropriate for Angelica and Mary Moser to be alone in a room with a male sitter or in a studio with male artists. And that's, I think, another thing to bear in mind about this portrait, even though it's made a little bit after her admittance to the Royal Academy. That sort of very modest gesture that she's making by sort of holding her hand in front of her chest there, I think is, to me, seems like a reference. She's sort of reinforcing her femininity and her modesty because being a woman who was kind of at play in a man's world, she was automatically subject to all sorts of allegations or aspersions about her morality and her virtue and all of that sort of thing. So I think in this work, she's asserting her morality and her virtue and at the same time issuing a bit of a, you know, a kind of a in your face to the people, to her detractors, the people who assumed that because she was a woman in a man's world that she was somehow not all she purported to be or appeared to be. And then of course the other wonderful thing about this work is it's a very beautiful statement about her sense of identity as an artist. I think I've included Angelica as an example of strength. Yeah, she's my strength example. So she's someone who is very assured of herself and very confident in her identity as an artist, which is one of the things that's most striking, not just about this self-portrait, but the other self-portraits that she made. And there's also some really sort of interesting other connections to other works in the exhibition that this particular portrait points to. So even though Angelica and Mary were both admitted into the Royal Academy in 1768, it was almost another 170 years before the third female member of the Royal Academy, an artist named Dame Laura Knight was admitted. She was admitted in 1935 or '36, I think. So understandably the Royal Academy wasn't an institution that feminists had a lot of time for, so much so that in the early 20th century, in 1914, the Royal Academy became, or the Royal Academy's sort of annual exhibition became the target of some militant suffragettes. So fed up were they with the Royal Academy's attitudes to women that a couple of ladies decided to attack paintings that were on exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1914, including a lady named Mary Woods who took to a painting of the novelist Henry James with a meat cleaver. It's a painting of Henry James by a very distinguished American-born artist named John Singer Sargent, and of course it was an outrage. It was reported on in the newspapers. People were, seemed to be more outraged not about the damage to the painting but by the fact that the damage to the painting was done by a little old lady with a meat cleaver. Anyway, but the painting of James was taken off display. It was taken back to Sargent's studio. He patched it up, it went back on exhibition, and that work, the painting of Henry James was later acquired by the National Portrait Gallery and is also on display in "Shakespeare to Winehouse." So if you do manage to make it to Canberra and see the show, keep an eye out for the picture of Henry James and see if you can see the damage that was done by Mrs. Woods in 1914. You're apparently still able to discern exactly where she chopped into the canvas with the meat cleaver. Next slide, I think, Hector. Emma Hamilton, she's a little bit like Nell Gwyn, I guess, in that she's someone, if you see her referred to or described, she's often just described as the mistress of Lord Horatio Nelson, the sort of, obviously the incredible military hero of the, the most famous military hero of early 19th century Britain, but a little bit like Nell as well, there's a hill of a lot more to Emma Hamilton than meets the eye. And there's certainly a lot more to her than having just been Horatio Nelson's girlfriend. She's someone, also like Nell, who's very much a kind of a rags-to-riches story, I suppose. She's very much a, she was very much a self-made woman. She was a blacksmith's daughter. She was born in Cheshire into absolute object poverty but nevertheless managed to rise above that and make her way in London society and eventually become the wife of a man named Sir William Hamilton, who was a British ambassador to Naples at the end of the 18th and early 19th century. And it was through her husband, William Hamilton, that she met Nelson. But she's someone who is also very, known as the sort of favourite model and a muse of an artist named George Romney, who is the creator of this work. Incidentally, she's also someone who was a subject of Angelica Kauffmann's. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York's got a beautiful drawing of Emma by Angelica. But yeah, she's someone who very much kind of made her own way, and part of the way that she did that was through her association with men like George Romney, who painted her obsessively. He's made many, many portraits of Emma Hamilton. And she also made a name for herself as a kind of a early form of performance artist in a way. She developed this series of performances called "Attitudes" wherein she would sort of invoke and portray various different sort of goddesses and other stories from mythology. And so she was a bit of a kind of a performance sensation as well as an art sensation as well. And very significant also, because as you can see from this portrait, she wasn't the shy, retiring type and quite unusual in that when you see portraits of Emma Hamilton and Romney, of course, wasn't the only one who painted her, she's very much looking you straight in the eye. She's not sort of shying away from the fact that she's in the public eye and not shying away from the notoriety that she would subsequently earn as Nelson's mistress. Next one, I think, Hector. Ah, "Radclyffe Hall." So Radclyffe Hall is my example of courage. She is a writer, and I just sort of, before I go any further, I just sort of wanna make clear that I'll refer to Radclyffe using pronouns she and her. There's some sort of question now about whether had there been an awareness of transgender identity when she was alive, she might've identified as a transgender person. But because historians and so forth all refer to her as she and her, I'll use that terminology as well in discussing her. She was born in Bournemouth in 1880. Her birth name was Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe Hall, born into a relatively wealthy family, although her parents divorced when she was only three years old. Her mother remarried when she was, when Radclyffe was 10, and though she was sent to sort of fashionable schools and would outwardly have been, seemed to be a very kind of well-to-do person, she later said that her childhood was extremely unhappy. Her mother, for example, is supposedly, is believed to have said to her that she regretted having her. Her stepfather wasn't a particularly sympathetic or appealing character. So she was very lucky, I think, when she was 21 to come into a very significant amount of money that had been held for her in trust by her grandfather. And when she came into that amount of money, of course, it meant that she didn't have to worry about how to earn a living, which for women of her class in the early 20th century generally meant having to find a husband to support her. But spared that fate, Radclyffe Hall decided to become a writer. When she was in her early 20s, 20s and early 30s, she published books of poetry, and then she went on to writing seven novels. And the fifth of her novels, a book called "The Well of Loneliness" is probably the work or the novel for which Radclyffe Hall is best known. Now, the book was, it's a semi-biographical novel about the relationship between the book's central character, a young woman who wishes to be seen as a man and who calls herself Stephen, and Stephen's older, married female lover, so a very, very explicit and unashamed representation of female love and a lesbian relationship. And there are very strong parallels between Stephen's story, the story of the central character in "The Well of Loneliness," and Hall's own life. She called herself John, for example, and her pen name, Radclyffe Hall, is not her birth name. Radclyffe was actually her father's name. So she adopted a masculine identity, and it was that masculine name under which all of her works were published. And as you can see above from this portrait painted by an artist named Charles Buchel in about 1918, Radclyffe Hall wore men's clothes and very much adopted a masculine persona, the very short hair, she was always photographed smoking pipes or smoking cigars, wearing ties and cravats and also wearing a monocle, as you can see in this portrait. We might have a look at that detail now, Hector, if you don't mind, which we put in for Gill's sake. She says this is the best hand in the exhibition, and it is pretty beautiful. So, yeah, and there are, you know, various other parallels between the characters in "The Well of Loneliness" and Radclyffe Hall herself. Radclyffe Hall described herself as, described herself as being someone, a man in a woman's body. And she was very much in tune with theories about sexuality and sexual identity that were current in the early 20th century and which held that it was possible for gender identity and gender roles to be inverted or reversed for some people. So Hall also always identified with that sort of way of thinking. She very much saw herself as an outsider and, indeed, said that she wrote books like, and it's not just "The Well of Loneliness," I think all of her novels sort of deal with this question, but she did very much say that "The Well of Loneliness" was something that she wrote, and I quote here, "To put my pen at the service of some of the most misunderstood people in the world." And while this particular portrait was painted 10 years before "The Well of Loneliness" was published, it's a really powerful statement, I think, about Radclyffe Hall's courage. She wasn't someone who was going to be shamed into conformity. She was someone who was very upfront about her sexuality and identity and had the courage to be very open about her two long-term intimate relationships with women, the first with a lady named Mabel Batten, and the second following Mabel's death with Lady Una Troubridge, who she was with for the rest of her life. Radclyffe Hall died in 1943, and Lady Troubridge later donated this particular picture to NPG London after her death, or before her death in the 1960s. So Radclyffe Hall, very much someone who had the courage to stand up to the outrage that was directed at her throughout her life but in particular after "The Well of Loneliness" was published. So it was published in 1928 and then almost immediately declared to be obscene and was banned from publication and, you know, immoral and obscene and all of this sort of stuff, a bad influence on society, et cetera, et cetera. So the book was taken out of publication and taken out of circulation and wasn't published finally until 1949, which is six years after Radclyffe Hall had passed away. Next one, thanks, Hector. I think this is the last one, so. And the most recent work, not in, just in today's presentation, but the most recent work in the exhibition is an absolutely stunning photograph of Malala Yousafzai by an Iranian-born artist named Shirin Neshat. For those of you who've seen the exhibition, this photograph is, she's huge, and it's incredibly powerful. You sort of walk around the corner and you just see Malala, and it's, she's really quite glorious. It's a really spectacular picture, a work which was commissioned by NPG London in 2018. And I think, you know, she's a good endpoint, not just for the exhibition, but for this presentation, because Malala is someone who exemplifies all of those characteristics that I've been speaking about so far. I've included her here as an example of, or as an exemplar of wisdom, but she's also courageous. She's also authoritative. She's also creative. She's everything, she's got everything that all of the other subjects have in spades, all combined in this one extraordinary individual. We could talk for hours, I think, about Malala and about this work. But the thing that I really want to sort of draw your attention to is the way, and you can probably see it from the slide here, the way that she has, you can see that there's calligraphy or text sort of written across her face. Oh, thanks, Hector, that's better. I'd forgotten we had a detail of this one. And that text is a transcription of a translation of a poem about an historical heroine also named Malala, and the poem, which I can't read to you, unfortunately, because it's sort of copyright protected, but the poem that's inscribed on Malala's face is a poem in which our Malala, this Malala is compared to that earlier Malala and in which the poem talks about this Malala and the former Malala in terms of courage and inspiration and fighting and fighting for what she believes in, being a warrior for what she believes in, and in Malala's case, using education as a way and the pen as a way of fighting against the enemy. So an extraordinarily powerful work and one of those works that's got many, many sort of layers to it. You can literally sort of look into Malala's eyes for hours and really get a wonderful sense of this extraordinary individual, and indeed, that's what the artist herself said about, the privilege of creating this work was to be in the presence of this extraordinarily dignified and wise and beautiful young woman. And I think it just, it so comes out in the portrait. It's a really fabulous way to end, and I'm running out of time, so I will be quiet now. Thank you.
- Oh, Jo, I'm so sorry. I interrupted your flow there because I had to move into space for wrapping up the programme. But I just wanted to thank you so much for taking the time today, and apologies to everybody, we ran over time. It doesn't look like anyone minded one bit, because we were just mesmerised by the stories that you were telling us about these incredible, inspiring, powerful women. I have to say that my, I brought my daughter along to see the "Shakespeare to Winehouse" exhibition last week, she got a little sneak peek, and she, I couldn't budge her from standing in front of that portrait of Malala. It honestly is something that you could stand in front of for hours and still get more out of. She really does have the most powerful gaze and is such an impressive woman. So we're very, very lucky to have her portrait on display here at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra until the 17th of July. I really hope that some of you may be able to come and see this exhibition in person. Please do jump on our website, portrait.gov.au/icons for all the information about this exhibition and to book tickets. Otherwise, if you can't, we will be bringing you throughout the course of the exhibition a lot more of these virtual tours and virtual programmes so that we can share some more incredible stories about these portraits with you. I really do have to acknowledge just before we leave our Auslan interpreter, Megan, who I'm afraid has had to run off to another job, but I neglected to acknowledge her in the beginning, and I'm very sorry for that. She's done a marvellous job of interpreting this programme for us all today. So thank you so much for joining us. Please follow us on social media, @PortraitAu, or jump on our website, portrait.gov.au for more information about our virtual programmes coming up soon. Until then, take care, and we'll see you later on, bye-bye.
