Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In the recent musical Six, Henry VIII’s queens are solo singers (“Don’t Lose Ur Head”, “Heart of Stone”) competing for the role of worst-treated wife until they abandon rivalry and join together as a girl band. It is as a group that the queens have always been considered. In countless retellings, their fates — divorced, beheaded, died etc — rather than their individual stories build what National Portrait Gallery curator Charlotte Bolland calls “an almost implausible melodrama”, the most famous episode in English history.The NPG’s superb new exhibition Six Lives: The Stories of Henry VIII’s Queens is, surprisingly, the first to focus on the women who married the murderous king. It’s a spectacular six-century display, from the portraits — fluid, vivid, as present as a gasp of breath — with which Hans Holbein defined this age of knights and bishops, to the glittery punk-meets-Tudor spandex and vinyl sequinned costumes for Six. On the way, there are royal jewels, Flemish silken tapestries, Degas’s portrait of Anne of Cleves, Ernst Lubitsch’s psychologically chilling expressionist movie Anna Boleyn, and Hiroshi Sugimoto’s spooky, hyper-real photographs of the wax queens at Madame Tussauds.Most engrossingly, each woman gets a gallery to herself, charting her reign, background, legend. Together these sumptuous displays demonstrate how the queens used material culture, paintings, embroideries, costumes, decorative objects, to construct their images and identities, and how these things shape our perceptions of them. It is the perfect NPG show, using art to bring history to life, celebrating the power of portraiture, excavating a whole chivalric milieu of surfaces decorated with royal branding, extravagant pageantry declaring each regime’s legitimacy.Katherine of Aragon, first and longest-ruling queen, proclaimed her Spanish Catholic loyalty with her personal emblem, the pomegranate or “Granada apple”, memorialising Spain’s recent triumph over the Muslim emirate. Adorning her illuminated manuscripts, writing box and gilded silver cup, the pomegranate also symbolised the fertility which her marriage so disastrously lacked, ultimately leading her to be “unqueened”.Her successor, Anne Boleyn, staged for her coronation pageant the biblical tale of Esther, triumphant second wife of Ahasuerus after his divorce, as dramatised in the huge tapestry here owned by Henry VIII. Exquisitely carved in Reigate stone is a phoenix rising within a Tudor rose garden — the badge of third wife, Jane Seymour, asserting her reign as a new beginning.There are Parisian court cards as played by Anne of Cleves, fourth wife, learning Henry’s favourite card games while delayed at Calais, and gems probably inherited from one woman to another. Portraits show Katherine of Aragon, Jane Seymour and Katherine Parr, sixth wife, wearing the same Tau cross necklace. Holbein’s acute chalk drawings of ambitious ladies-in-waiting such as Lady Joan Meutas, who negotiated court intrigue and survived to serve four queens, are the warm human backcloth.These feminised milieux contrast brilliantly with two brutal images of Henry at the opening: a 16th-century copy of Holbein’s iconic (now lost) swagger portrait, standing in aggressive posture, legs wide apart, large codpiece and padded shoulders prominent, and the glinting, gilt-etched full suit of metal armour in which this bulky, imposing monarch — at 6ft 3 a Tudor giant — jousted in his wives’ honour.“From first to last he was a dangerous and appalling animal,” historian Geoffrey Elton concluded, and we sense that in the cold eyes and hard features of an anonymous youthful half-length portrait (1520). Its pendant is riveting: Katherine of Aragon, aged 35, in crimson and gold, dignified, intelligent, resolute, wears an expression between sympathy and reproach as she faces her spouse. Miscarriages and still births dominated her existence, while her husband strutted about court proclaiming his affection for his illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, born 1519.The depiction of Henry’s first wife hung for centuries in Lambeth Palace, incorrectly thought until 2013 to portray Katherine Parr. Most of the queens, it turns out, have had tangled or manipulated identities. The most reproduced depiction of Anne Boleyn, shrewd, sophisticated, pearl choker dangling the jewelled “B” tight around her neck — reference to her beheading? — was made after her death; no securely attributed painted portrait exists. One at Nidd Hall, Yorkshire, may be Anne; it could also be Jane Seymour.A Holbein miniature long said to depict fifth wife, Katherine Howard, loaned here from the Buccleuch Collection, was convincingly claimed in 2021 to represent instead her predecessor Anne of Cleves; it is too stately and mature to be the teenage Katherine. The heavy lids, thick eyebrows and sleepy look correspond to Holbein’s earlier notorious portrait of Anne, commissioned for Henry to weigh up her attractions. When diplomats for Thomas Cromwell, trying to secure an alliance with a Protestant state, complained that Anne’s “monstrous habit and apparel” made it impossible to assess the accuracy of this and her sister’s portrait, the German adviser snapped back: “Would you see them naked?” In dating app terms, Anne did not resemble her profile picture, and Holbein’s flattery cost Cromwell his head after Henry (“I like her not!”) refused to consummate the union. Anne, bought off with estates confiscated from Cromwell, was quickly dispatched to the country as “the king’s beloved sister”, and Henry married Katherine Howard on the day of Cromwell’s execution, July 28 1540. Howard followed him to the block in 1542, which explains why there is no certain depiction of her. The NPG is a winners’ gallery: Henry banished the images of the wives he murdered, each accused of adultery, seeking to erase them from history. It was dangerous in his lifetime to possess depictions of Anne Boleyn or Katherine Howard. Wily courtier Thomas Howard, whose splendid interrogatory portrait in lynx fur by Holbein looms over the room devoted to his niece, declared that Katherine deserved to burn.By then, according to the imperial ambassador, “few if any ladies” aspired to be queen (Christina of Denmark said she would consider a proposal if she had two heads). Katherine Parr, serious, responsible, well-educated, stepped up reluctantly. After Anne Boleyn, whose determination to be Henry’s queen not mistress changed history by causing his divorce, the break with Rome and England’s Protestant reformation, Parr had the most political significance. She strove to reunite Henry with his daughters Mary and Elizabeth, and urged the Third Succession Act restoring them as heirs. The later 16th century would otherwise have been more turbulent.Hilary Mantel said she conceived her Wolf Hall Tudor trilogy as “flickering patterns of light and dark, mirrors and shadows . . . a slow swirling backdrop of jewelled black and gold”. This exhibition of private faces coming in and out of public spaces, of love and fantasy sparring against realpolitik, is as immersive and compelling.To September 8, npg.org.ukFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
