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Tudors to Saxe-Coburg-Gothas to Kendra Scott
During the Second World War the royal family changed their surname from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor, and one can understand why. First of all, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was just too many letters for the mailbox (Thames Street, Windsor, Berkshire SL4 1NJ). And then there was the matter of their German cousins of the same catalogue of names being a spot of bother from 1914-1918.
Windsor sounds more comfortably English, like the names developers give their pop-up subdivisions. Who would buy a house on “SaxeCoburgGothabahn” or “Hohenzollernstrasse” when “Windsor Way” is so much easier to pronounce and spell?
The American obsession with kings and queens continues after 200 years of professing red republicanism. Each autumn students in every school elect a homecoming queen, not a chairwoman of the Students’, Workers’, and Soldiers’ Soviet, and in the spring a prom king and prom queen, not a prom good comrade of the month and another prom good comrade of the month. Video productions – or product – featuring the love lives of kings, queens, and czars are consistently profitable.
Thus, that an exhibition of British (English, mostly, but let it stand) royal portraits should be a big hit in Texas is not a surprise.
Through the 27th of January The Houston Museum of Fine Arts (https://www.mfah.org/) features, among many other galleries and offerings and films and lectures, Tudors to Windsors: British Royal Portraits from Holbein to Warhol. Most of the pictures are on loan from London’s National Portrait Gallery, displayed only in Houston and then in Australia before being returned to England. The Houston museum staff have combined the visiting pictures with some of their permanent collection for a brilliant, accessible, and well-documented display of paintings, a few artifacts, and photographs among three capacious galleries.
One passes by Warhol’s stains and smears, of course.
There were many delights and surprises, but the picture y’r obedient ‘umble scrivener most wanted to see, Holbein’s portrait of Sir Thomas More, now Saint Thomas More, was a surprise only in its beauty and excellence. The cliché that a reproduction is never as good as the original is a cliché because it is true, and this is especially true with this portrait.
Many of Holbein’s portraits are highly stylized because those who commissioned the pictures wanted the conventions of the time. However, Holbein’s Sir Thomas More is wonderfully true to the man.
More does sit in a formal pose, but looking away to the viewer’s right, perhaps in some sense perceiving his martyrdom, or perhaps seeing beyond his martyrdom.
He wears his Chain (and it proved to be a chain indeed) of Office as Chancellor of England, and its Tudor rose is place directly over More’s heart, indicating his love for and loyalty to King Henry in spite of all.
In More’s hands there is a bit of paper, and anyone familiar with Robert Bolt’s play will associate it with the fictional Averil Manchin’s petition and her attempted bribe.
In sum, the picture is in one way a standard portrait of a successful attorney, judge, and government official, but in other ways we see something of the man Holbein came to know. As More’s daughter Margaret says in A Man for All Seasons, there is a difference between the man’s office and the man himself.
The wonderful protective glass is so unobtrusive that it seems not to be there at all, and so one can see even the brush strokes of individual bristles, and the layerings that build up almost a glowing iridescence even in the drab fabric (More was no peacock).
I spent some time before this picture, while all around me shoals of beeping rental earphones were coming and going like the tide. Thomas More deserves it. Holbein’s painting deserves it.
You can see poor representations of Holbein’s More, including (http://visual-arts-cork.com/famous-paintings/thomas-more-holbein.htm), but, no, it’s just not the same.
A young person of our acquaintance took the spouse-person and me to see the pictures, and was rewarded afterward with a new pair of Kendra Scott ® earrings. In them, too, art can be found. Perhaps in 500 years they will be seen and admired in some wonderful painting.
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