Love at the Worcester Museum of Art

 

 

LOVE STORIES FROM THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON

Worcester Museum of Art

Worcester, Massachusetts

Through March 13, 2022

 

London’s National Portrait Gallery is an underappreciated gem. It’s filled with so many splendorous things that it can loan enough items to fill a large exhibition. That’s a good thing indeed if you can get to the Worcester Art Museum (WAM) before March 13. Call Love Stories from the National Portrait Gallery the perfect art show for Valentine’s Day. It consists of lovers from the 15^th century to the present. Best of all, its definition of love is broad.

 

The Sandys 1571 Artist Unknown

In that spirit, the first thing one sees upon entering the gallery is a series of photos of Audrey Hepburn (1929-93), surely one of the most beloved screen stars of all time. I’ve heard it said that she was the kind of person who, upon first viewing, one simply wished to cuddle. I’m not sure everyone felt that way, but I surely did. But to jump back in time, I was also enamored of a double portrait of Edwin Sandys and his wife Cicely. You wouldn’t infer from their faces, but theirs was a forbidden love; as Archbishop of York before the Reformation, his marriage was deemed illegal. Yet he and Cicely had nine children, so stuff that in your papal mitre and smoke it!

 

Burton and Taylor by Terry'Neill 1971

Paul and Linda McCartney by Humphrey Ocean 1976

John and Yoko by Tom Blau 1969

Hughes and Plath by Rollie McKenna 1959

John Maynard and Lydia Keynes by William Roberts 1932

 

I’ll circle back to forbidden love, but first let’s take a look at famous lovers. Robert and Elizabeth Browning fell into that category, but I was more moved of a bronze casting of their intertwined hands than of their painted portraits. Being that WAM borrowed from a British collection, we see paintings and photographs of famous UK lovers, even when their main squeezes are from the Colonies and beyond: Paul and Linda McCartney, Mick and Bianca Jagger, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb, and John Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova, among others. The latter has a particularly unusual quality, as John Maynard is painted conventionally for the time, but Lydia has an art deco abstracted look. 

 

Helen and Kate by Graham Hughes 2014 

Strachey

Pears and Britten by Kenneth Green 1943

 

 

The exhibit isn’t confined to heterosexual love. You can also see Oscar Wilde posing with Lord Alfred Douglas, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, singer Peter Pears and composer Benjamin Britten, Olympian gold medalists Helen and Kate Richardson-Walsh, and Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington. The latter couple had perhaps the most daring of all relationships. Theirs was a lavender marriage, a term indicating that he was a gay man and she a lesbian. I posted Strachey’s painting by Carrington, as it captures Strachey’s understated effeminate qualities.

 

Ellen Terry by Watts, 1864

Peake and Gillmore, 1940s

 

 

Other items in the exhibition are simply stunning images. George Frederic Watts’ oil of his young bride actress Ellen Terry is one such image; artists Maeve Gilmore and Mervyn Peake’s oil paint selfies another. It’s hard not to see the humanity in Ford Maddox Brown’s painting of Henry and Millicent Fawcett, as she tenderly ministers to her husband who was blinded in a hunting accident. The most unorthodox image is surely Ben Nicholson’s self-portrait with Barbara Hepworth, a marriage made in modernist heaven. There is even unrequited love such as that painter George Romney (1734-1802) held for his muse Emma Hamilton, a maid and a bawdy one at that.

 

The Fawcetts by Ford Maddox Brown, 1872

Nicholson and Hepworth 1933

 

 

If you are one of those who tend not to read museum labels, I understand; many curators tell us way more than we need or want to know. I would, however, urge you to break that habit for this exhibit. Those wall placards tell us about the relationships as well as the art and many of the former are touching. In the time of pandemic, maybe all we need is love.

 

Rob Weir