0:10

>>Welcome, everyone, to today’s program,
the Isabel and Alfred Bader Lecture in European Arts given this
year by Professor Karen Hearn.

0:19

We’re grateful for the continued
support of Bader Philanthropies for making this program possible. My name is Suzanne van de Meerendonk.

0:27

And I am the Bader Curator and
Researcher of European Art here at the Agnes Etherington Art
Centre at Queen’s University.

0:35

Before we begin this conversation
tonight, we would like to take a moment to acknowledge the land on
which we work study and live.

0:43

Queen’s University is situated on traditional
Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territory.

0:49

To acknowledge this traditional territory
is to recognize its longer history, one predating the establishment
of the earliest European colonies.

0:59

It is also to acknowledge this territory
significance for the Indigenous peoples who lived and continue to live upon it, peoples
whose practices and spiritualities were tied

1:10

to the lands and continue
to develop in relationship to the territory and its
other inhabitants today.

1:17

The Kingston Indigenous Community continues to reflect the area’s Anishinaabek
and Haudenosaunee roots.

1:25

There’s also a significant Metis community
and there are First Peoples from other Nations across Turtle Islands present here today.

1:31

I would like to express gratitude for
the ongoing stewardship of the lands

1:37

which makes it possible for
all of us to gather here today. I am myself a somewhat recent settler of
Indonesia and Dutch heritage coming here

1:45

from the Netherlands by way of
what is now the United States. And it’s not lost on me that this
parallels the path of arrival of Dutch

1:54

and other European settlers during the same
period that we will bring our focus to today.

2:00

As we do so, I reflect on the
opportunities afforded to me as a result of violent colonial histories and
realities and a privilege I have to work

2:09

and build a new life on these lands. And I would like to encourage our online
participants joining from other locations

2:18

to consider their own position
with regards to such histories and the land where they find themselves.

2:24

And we will post a few links in the
chat that may be helpful for that.

2:30

Today, I am pleased to welcome
both our in-person audience

2:35

and those joining us live over Zoom. We also have live captioning provided by Max

2:42

and ASL interpretation provided
by Ashley and Christy. Thank you all very much for being here.

2:49

If you have any questions during these lecture
events, please hold those until the end.

2:55

We will have a period for questions
and conversation following the lecture.

3:01

And both our attendees here in the room and those online will have an
opportunity to participate in this Q&A.

3:09

And finally, for those of you who are joining us
in person, following this lecture around 7:30,

3:16

we’ll have a reception with food and drinks. It’s now my distinct pleasure to introduce
art historian, curator and renowned scholar

3:25

of British and Dutch Art, Professor Karen Hearn. We are particularly relieved that she is
joining us in person today as we have planned

3:34

to welcome Karen already in the now
infamous month of March of 2020. Within days of travelling to Kingston
to deliver her lecture that year,

3:42

the lecture event unfortunately had to
be canceled due to a global pandemic

3:47

that has impacted all of our lives since. So, I am grateful that we are able to
meet here with her and all of you today.

3:55

And we can also — and that we can also share
the lecture with an even larger audience now due

4:01

to hybrid organization of today’s program. Karen Hearn travelled to us from London
where she’s currently an honorary professor

4:10

in the Department of English Language and
Literature at the University College London. She was also the longtime curator
of 16th and 17th Century British Art

4:20

at Tate Britain from 1992 to 2012. Her scholarly record counts numerous
publications and major exhibitions

4:28

on early modern European art, particularly
within the genre of portraiture.

4:34

Her research interests range from the impact and
significance of refugee and immigrant artists

4:39

in 16th and 17th century England, gender and
self-fashioning, women’s patronage and the work

4:46

of artists Anthony van Dyck
and Cornelius Johnson. Her lecture tonight draws from just one of these
various research interests, the representation

4:56

of pregnancy in historic European art. This led her to organize the
exhibition “Portraying Pregnancy:

5:04

From Holbein to Social Media” which was shown
at the Foundling Museum in London in 2020.

5:11

And we actually will have a couple of
copies of the exhibition catalogue for sale

5:17

at our reception today if you’re interested. The run of this groundbreaking
exhibition was unfortunately cut short

5:25

by pandemic-related closures. So, therefore, it gives us all the
more joy to be able to introduce Karen

5:32

as our speaker on this exciting topic. Please join me in giving a very warm
welcome to Professor Karen Hearn.

5:41

[ Applause ]

5:52

>> Thank you very much, Suzanne. And it’s such a pleasure to be here.

5:58

As you’ve heard, the lecture was
originally due to take place two years ago but the pandemic struck and
changed all our plans.

6:05

I’m absolutely delighted to be
here tonight in person and also

6:13

with an actual audience present,
with you all present. And also knowing that so many friends and
colleagues are watching, tuning in online,

6:24

some of them way past their bedtimes.

6:29

I’m extremely grateful to Bader Philanthropies
for generously making this possible

6:35

and to Suzanne and her colleagues
for all their very hard work. It’s been very complicated
to make this a reality.

6:48

In late January this year, the singer and
businesswoman Rihanna announced to the world

6:54

that she was pregnant by stepping out
publicly dressed in carefully chosen clothing

7:00

that unambiguously displayed her baby bump. As People.com stated, “The singer debuted
her baby bump while out in New York City

7:11

over the weekend with her boyfriend.” And with the ubiquity of
cameras, paparazzi, mobile phones,

7:18

images of her doing that
immediately went global. Rihanna thus chose to curate the precise moment
of release of this significant personal news.

7:32

And from the outset, the online and
print media world knew the specific date

7:39

on which these very public images were made. Things were rather different in
16th and 17th Century Britain.

7:49

A portrait results from a series of choices
which arrived at through the interaction

7:56

of the artist, the person
who commissions the image, and if they are not the actual
commissioner, the sitter, her or himself.

8:07

It’s extremely rare to find
evidence of the precise circumstances

8:13

in which an early modern portrait was
commissioned, and thus of the thought processes

8:18

and decisions that informed its
eventual content and appearance.

8:24

Pregnancy resulting in the production of healthy
legitimate children has always been central

8:32

to the role of noble and royal women. It maintains familial and dynastic continuity.

8:41

Although both conception and obstetric success
could sometimes be extremely problematic

8:49

and were widely acknowledged as such,
many early modern women did spend much

8:56

of their adult lives being pregnant. Until recently, however, art historians
have been surprisingly uncurious

9:05

about the significance of this
for pre-contemporary portraits.

9:11

As you’ve heard, for some years, I’ve been
researching and identifying painted portraits

9:17

of early modern women which were made
at a time when they were pregnant, whether that pregnancy is made visible
in the portrait as we see here or not.

9:30

And in this work, I’ve primarily
addressed portraits of British elite women.

9:36

And as you’ve heard most recently, this
resulted in the exhibition that I curated

9:42

at the Foundling Museum in London which opened in January 2020 just before the
pandemic entitled “Portraying Pregnancy.”

9:53

From Holbein, we had a beautiful Holbein
drawing lent by Her Majesty, The Queen.

10:04

And I’m showing you here an
installation shot from that exhibition.

10:10

And as you’ve heard, there’s also a
standalone book of the same title. And I was astonished and delighted when at
the weekend, I heard from a number of sources

10:23

that the New York Times in talking further about Rihanna’s pregnancy had actually
referenced the exhibition in the book.

10:32

So, although it happened before
the pandemic, it’s not forgotten.

10:40

While today I shall principally speak about
English or British portraits, after 1603,

10:48

England and Scotland joined
together and it becomes Britain, the artists names that you will hear will
mostly be Netherlandish ones because many

10:59

of the leading portrait painters to
the English British elite were born

11:04

and in most cases were trained
in the low countries.

11:10

And they then travelled to Britain sometimes
coming as Protestant religious exiles

11:16

or even refugees or sometimes
coming for economic betterment.

11:24

My own research began with this specific
English portrait of about 1595, stylistically

11:32

and technically clearly by a
painter called Marcus Gheeraerts II, Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger.

11:38

And he’d been born in Bruges about 30 years
previously and had been raised in London.

11:46

His father who was an artist, too,
Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder had moved to Protestant London in 1568 with his
children as a religion-motivated migrant.

11:58

The identity of the sitter is unknown. But as you can see, she is unambiguously
depicted as visibly pregnant.

12:08

And this may seem to be an unusual
even anomalous form of presentation,

12:13

but it was one that turned out
to have been surprisingly common in Elizabethan and Jacobean Britain.

12:22

And that is from around 1562 until about 1635.

12:30

The term pregnancy did not in fact have
its modern-day meaning during this period.

12:37

So, words like bearing, breeding,
teaming and great with child or large

12:44

with child were the ones
that were commonly used. But perhaps the most frequent one was
big-bellied which I’ve used in the title

12:55

and which is, of course, fantastically accurate. So, I have the opportunity to steer
this painting towards Tate Britain

13:05

where I was the curator at the time. But it set me thinking about all the
women who might have been painted

13:11

at a time when they were pregnant. But in portraits for which the standard Western
European default choice was made which was not

13:21

to indicate the fact — not
to indicate the pregnancy. And the reasons for that default choice
seemed to be many an unwillingness

13:30

to record permanently what was seen as a
temporary state, social taboos or bodily outline

13:39

that resulted from a woman
being sexually active. And the perceived role of an early modern
portrait to idealize and as it were to improve

13:50

on reality which obviously with painting,
you can make a lot of choices like that.

13:56

You can improve and make changes.

14:02

In identifying and interpreting such
portraits, it makes a great difference if the sitter unlike this one
can be securely identified.

14:12

While it remains hard to establish biographical
facts for so many women of the past,

14:18

the graying availability of archival
information online means that increasingly,

14:23

we may find specific relevant dates
for the lives of at least some women,

14:29

particularly elite women for whom records have
a better chance of surviving, so that we can try

14:37

to link the record of a birth and thus the
pregnancy that preceded it with the time

14:43

at which a portrait might have been painted. And of course, we must always consider that the
painting process itself may have taken place

14:51

through a number of sittings and
possibly over quite a long period. This is a portrait that we know was painted at a
time when the sitter was thought to be pregnant

15:05

and when she was apparently showing
physical signs of that pregnancy. This is Henry VIII’s elder daughter, Mary
Tudor, who succeeded to the throne of England

15:15

in July 1553 upon the death of
her half-brother, Edward VI.

15:22

On 25th of July 1554 in Winchester,
she married King Philip II of Spain,

15:31

the son of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor
Charles V. It was the 27-year-old Philip’s

15:38

second marriage. Mary herself was 37.

15:43

By September, Mary was already
rumoured to be pregnant. And on the 23rd of November, it was
reported back to Charles V that, quote,

15:52

“The Queen is veritably with child because
she has felt the babe,” that must mean

15:58

that she’s felt the moving of the child, “and
there are other likely and customary symptoms

16:06

such as the state of her breasts.” On the 28th of November, Mary sat under
her cloth of state in the Great Chamber

16:15

of Whitehall Palace, quote, “richly
appareled and her belly,” there we are again,

16:21

“her belly laid out that all men
might see that she was with child.” So, a very public performance of
her pregnancy which, of course,

16:30

was of huge dynastic significance. The following day on the 29th of November,
the Pope’s emissary, Cardinal Pole,

16:39

presided over the reconciliation of the
English Church to Roman Catholicism.

16:45

And this had been Mary’s highest
priority the moment she came to the throne

16:50

to bring England back to Catholicism. And it was reported that when
Mary first met Cardinal Pole,

16:58

she had felt her child move within her. And she had exclaimed “exultavit infans in utero pius.”

17:04

And this is a direct reference to the
New Testament narrative of The Visitation

17:13

and the experience felt at the time
by the Virgin Mary’s older kinswoman, Elizabeth, when the two women met.

17:21

So, Mary was pregnant with Christ and
Elizabeth with the future John the Baptist.

17:27

And in pre-Reformation England, The Visitation,

17:32

this moment had become an increasingly
popular theme in religious art.

17:38

Now, when Protestantism was brought in
under Henry VIII and then increasingly

17:43

under Edward VI, there was a great
deal of destruction of religious art.

17:48

And there was more destruction later. So, these two examples, visitations on
the screen are extremely rare survivals

17:59

on the left-hand side in a
church in Cambridgeshire and on the right-hand side a church in Devon.

18:06

And they happen to escape the iconoclasm.

18:11

So, we see Mary and Elizabeth meeting together.

18:17

And we see those words in the
banderole on the right-hand side.

18:22

As I’ve said, it’s often hard to be able to
date an early-painted portrait precisely.

18:28

But in the case of Mary Tudor’s
portrait, we can do so. It survives in three versions.

18:36

And the one on the screen is
the one in the Prado in Madrid. The Utrecht artist Anthonis Mor began
working for Emperor Charles V in 1549

18:47

and had painted Habsburg family members
in Brussels, in Portugal and in Spain.

18:52

Sent to England by Charles the V,
Mor was in London by mid November 1554

19:00

where he painted Mary in the seated posture
that he had often used for portraits

19:06

of Habsburg royal brides which is what Mary
had become through her marriage to Philip.

19:12

Although Mary was, as we’ve
heard, now thought to be pregnant, Mor has not depicted her as visibly so.

19:19

She wears a diamond ring and a large
pendant jewel which were betrothal gifts

19:25

from Charles and Philip respectively. And she holds a red rose, a multivalent symbol.

19:32

It’s an allusion to her namesake,
the Virgin Mary,

19:37

while also referencing her
appropriate love for her husband. And more politically, the red rose was also
an emblem of the Lancastrian Tudor dynasty

19:51

and had already appeared held in
the hand in numerous portraits of her late royal brother, Edward VI.

19:59

So, that rose is very complex symbol here. In London, a month later on the 20th of
December, Philip II signed a royal order

20:10

that appointed Anthonis Mor as his painter
indicating as Joanna Woodall has suggested

20:17

that he had formally accepted
Mor’s portraits of his wife, Mary.

20:23

But in fact, Mary would turn out
to have been undergoing a form of phantom pregnancy and never became a mother.

20:34

Similarly, turning for a moment to the Northern
Netherlands, this portrait of Reynu Semeyns,

20:40

a young widow depicts her while she
was betrothed to her second husband,

20:45

Jan Huygen van Linschoten as the date 1595.

20:51

And the inscription at the top left indicate
basically saying that she is betrothed.

20:59

She married van Linschoten
on the second of April 1595. And their only child, a daughter
was born on the 24th of August.

21:10

Thus, as Marlies Stoter has pointed out,
this portrait appears to acknowledge

21:15

that Reynu was pregnant when they married. She holds this cloth before her
which perhaps is — relates to that.

21:30

And Marlies pointed out that
the name Reynu contains a word which basically means pure in English.

21:37

So, there’s this interesting kind
of dichotomy between the two.

21:44

But establishing the precise time period over which an early modern portrait was
made is itself extremely hard normally.

21:54

Relevant evidence may include an original date
inscribed on the portrait itself as we see here

22:03

or a reference in a document to the
making of or the delivery of a painting. And that’s the evidence we have with
Anthonis Mor’s portraits of Mary Tudor.

22:12

But references like that are extremely rare. Often, regrettably, the main piece of evidence

22:21

for identifying a possibly
pregnancy-related portrait, maybe the date on which a female sitter
died in or shortly after giving birth,

22:33

burial records show how many
women were the victims of post-puerperal fever, a
form of sepsis for instance.

22:43

So, if a woman didn’t die from
complications during the actual birth,

22:49

she might very well die subsequently
from this infection.

22:54

It’s been estimated that one in 100 women died
as a result of childbed in early modern Britain

23:02

or an alternative figure that’s been
given is that one in 100 pregnancies ended in the mother’s death at this time.

23:09

So, the contemporary perception was that the
risks were very high both for mother and infant.

23:19

I’ve long wondered, for example, whether Lady
Katherine Dormer, the subject of this portrait

23:25

by the Scottish London-based painter John
Michael Wright which is inscribed with her name

23:32

and the date 1659, whether
it might have been intended to have been read as relating to a pregnancy.

23:39

The gesture with which Katherine holds up
the fabric of her skirt over the lower part

23:44

of her body seems to demand to be read. And it turns out that Katherine did die in
1659, the year inscribed on her portrait,

23:57

soon after giving birth to her only
surviving child on the 7th of May. And we know this because she was
buried on the 9th of June 1659.

24:09

With her right hand, the hand on the left, Katherine points towards a small
vase that rests on a stone ledge.

24:18

And if that vase is meant to be read as a
file for capturing tears, a classical symbol

24:24

of grief. That opens up the possibility
that this portrait might have been painted or at least perhaps finished posthumously.

24:35

If we’re seeking to find the
precise dates on which sittings for a British portrait took place, we
generally have to wait until the 18th century,

24:45

a period from which the sitter’s
books and appointment books of some of the leading portrait painters, people

24:53

like Sir Joshua Reynolds or
George Romney have survived. So, once we’ve got sitter books, we are in
a much better at a position to tie those

25:01

in with known pregnancies or women
who were sitting for their portrait.

25:10

How should we define visibly pregnant? And by what means is that information conveyed?

25:15

And the answer includes analysing
clothing depicted.

25:21

Understanding the dress of a period
is obviously key to the subject. Is a sitter actually pregnant

25:28

or is she portrayed wearing a
fashion that mimics pregnancy? Misinterpreting historic
clothing is easily done.

25:36

As you will all know, it seems that the
female figure who holds the gathered folds

25:43

of her long fine green wool dress over her
stomach in Jan van Eyck’s 1434 portrait

25:52

of probably Giovanni Arnolfini and his
wife is not to be read as with child.

25:58

Lorne Campbell writing in the National
Gallery Catalogue, this painting noted that,

26:04

“Although to modern eye, she
might look pregnant, she is not.”

26:11

Van Eyck’s “Dresden Triptych” of 1437 here

26:17

on the right shows the virgin St.
Catherine similarly posed and dressed

26:24

and is precisely comparable in shape. So you can see how really very much the same
dress shape is being worn by St. Catherine.

26:33

However, from the 16th century onwards,
people who saw the Arnolfini portrait

26:39

and who knew nothing about mid-15th century
Flemish dress conventions and why would they,

26:46

of course, routinely presumed
that the sitter was expecting.

26:51

And thus when the painting was inventoried
in the Spanish World Collection in 1700, the compiler described the group as a “youth
and a pregnant German woman,” slightly off beam,

27:03

quote, “and it appears that they
are getting married by night.” So, fashion can be extreme, can be strange
and unusual and can lead us astray.

27:18

Returning to the English Elizabethan
and Jacobean pregnancy portraits,

27:25

portraits that do depict
visible pregnancy bumps, it seems that they will commission
from a range of painters.

27:34

And as I mentioned, some, many
were artists with Flemish names. One of the earliest examples is this portrait
by the exiled Flemish painter, Hans Eworth,

27:47

who is known today in Britain as Hans Eworth. And in fact, there is a very beautiful
portrait by Hans Eworth in Ottawa.

28:00

And he was one of the most prolific
painters of the elite of his day. The sitter is the highly educated Mildred Cooke,

28:09

the wife of Queen Elizabeth’s
leading Minister William Cecil who was subsequently ennobled as Lord Burghley.

28:16

Now, the couple’s marriage was very
much an enterprise of joint minds.

28:23

Because Mildred is here unambiguously depicted
as pregnant, the bump here is presumed

28:29

to be the couple’s only surviving son, Robert
Cecil, who was born on the 1st of June 1563

28:37

and in fact who was to become a
leading minister to Queen Elizabeth in his own right late in her reign.

28:45

So, this picture probably
dates from early to mid-1563.

28:51

The couple had suffered a
tough road as would be parents. For the first nine years of their
marriage, there had been no children.

28:59

In 1554, Mildred gave birth to a daughter,
Francisca, who died shortly after birth,

29:07

and then in 1556 to Anne who lived to adulthood.

29:12

Mildred’s next two pregnancies produced
successively two boys, both named William,

29:18

the first of whom died a few hours after his
birth in October 1559, while the second lived

29:25

for 19 months but died in December 1562.

29:32

So, we can only imagine the distress that
these deaths must have caused the couple.

29:37

Here, Mildred’s loose gown of figured velvet
studded with jewels has hanging sleeves

29:43

and a curved stand-up collar and
fashionable scalloped wing shoulders.

29:49

It’s completely unfastened
to reveal a blackbodies and black skirt over her rounded stomach.

29:57

And the bump moreover is given visual evidence
by those wavy lines of gold embroidery.

30:04

So, the message is being made very clear. In her hand on the left,
Mildred holds a bunch of cherries

30:12

and they symbolize the state of innocence. And they’re thus appropriate to a chaste wife.

30:18

Now, contemporary viewer would have understood that pregnant Mildred was
extending the Cecil family and must

30:26

that her visibly depicted
condition is a heraldic statement.

30:31

And we see upper left half of the couple’s
painted arms, a very complicated heraldry

30:43

of showing, you know, the family
going back for some generations.

30:49

And the portrait may perhaps originally
have been paired with a companion portrait

30:55

of William, of her husband,
which seems to have become lost.

31:01

So, this is suggested, A, by the fact that
we’ve only got half of the couple’s arms there

31:08

at the left-hand edge and that perhaps it was
originally meant to visually dovetail with arms

31:16

on the right-hand edge of a portrait of William. And also because Mildred is posed facing to
our left, so that’s in the right-hand position,

31:28

that was generally employed for the woman in a
pair of portraits of husband and wife portraits.

31:36

The inclusion of heraldry which we saw also
in the portrait of Reynu Seymens reminds us

31:44

that these portraits are also about
bloodlines and about family, about breeding.

31:50

Now, the question of agency,
who made the decision

31:56

that a woman should be depicted
as visibly pregnant? Who made that choice is a key one and one
for which specific evidence doesn’t survive.

32:06

And I was grateful to Bert Watteuw for drawing to my attention an early
18th century French document

32:14

in which the Count de Merode
instructed a painter called Rendeux who was painting the family’s
portrait, a group portrait.

32:23

He instructed that he wanted his wife’s
pregnancy to be made visible in it.

32:29

So, that’s very interesting. It’s just one piece of evidence
out of our period but —

32:36

and unfortunately, that portrait
doesn’t survive. This is so often for this period the
survival rate must be extraordinarily low.

32:46

We can surmise that there were a number
of reasons why the choice might be made

32:53

to show a pregnancy in early
modern English portraits, starting with pride in anticipated
dynastic success.

33:02

So, this whole thing about the
family, the dynasty, the succession.

33:08

Now, the Cecils were firm Protestants in
the new Protestant reign of Elizabeth the I. And print Protestant texts intended for
women readers repeatedly emphasize the words

33:21

of St. Paul, “Woman will be saved through
childbearing provided she continues

33:27

in faith, love, holiness and virtue.” So, a visibly pregnant woman was both
seen to have been favoured by God

33:37

and to be carrying out God’s work. But in addition, at this time with an
unmarried queen, Elizabeth I on the throne

33:47

and widespread interest and increasing
concern about whom she might marry,

33:54

whether she would become a
mother and secure the succession, pregnancy had a further national dimension.

34:03

The later examples of the British
pregnancy portraits are appearing just

34:09

as the so-called Mother’s Legacy Texts
were gaining a wide currency in print.

34:15

In 1622, the well-educated
pregnant, gentle woman,

34:21

Elizabeth Joscelin secretly
wrote a manuscript addressed to her husband and to her unborn child.

34:30

And her husband didn’t know this. But it was in case she should
not survive childbed.

34:39

And we find a number of examples. This seems to be understandably
a very common impulse.

34:46

Jocelyn did die and probably of
that awful post-puerperal fever

34:52

because it was a few days
after her daughter was born. And her husband found the document.

34:58

And two years later, he had it published
under the title “The Mother’s Legacy.”

35:04

And it was to go through many editions. It was quite a best-seller. It really spoke to people.

35:11

And I’m showing you here on the
screen the first edition of it. It’s actually kind of a neat little
volume, easy to carry, easy to read.

35:22

So, perhaps a pregnancy portrait
should also be seen in relation

35:28

to the possibility of death, death in childbed. A printed funeral sermon for a
London woman who died in 1626, quote,

35:39

in the time of her childbed suggested that,
quote, “Wherein in for a woman to die,”

35:45

so to die in childbed, “is as
for a soldier to die in battle.”

35:53

So, for a man, his role was
to fight, fight in war.

35:58

And for a woman, her fight was in childbed. So, as I mentioned, a number of
pregnancy portraits were painted

36:08

by the Flemish-born Marcus Gheeraerts the
Younger and the unidentified pregnant woman

36:15

of about 1595 so that’s late in the reign of
Elizabeth I is one of the most powerful ones.

36:22

Her sumptuous attire with numerous pearls sewn onto it indicates her family’s
wealth and high status.

36:31

And pearls were the height of fashion in
England in the 1590s at the elite level.

36:40

They were very much seen as symbols of purity. And purity is what society
considered essential in a woman.

36:49

A visible pregnancy might also be
seen within a family group portrait.

36:56

And I’ve talked about that later French example. But here is a surviving picture, a
Habsburg portrait by an unidentified artist

37:06

of Emperor Maximilian II and his wife
Maria and three of their children. And Maria was a daughter of Emperor Charles
V. We have a specific dating for this painting

37:19

because it’s after the birth in June 1553
of Ernst who we see in the cradle there,

37:27

a baby in the cradle and before the
birth of Maria’s next child in June 1554.

37:33

So, she’s giving birth at yearly intervals. So, she presumably was pregnant
again when this one was painted.

37:41

And although we’re not seeing that
from the way her body is rendered, she is wearing a jeweled belt.

37:48

And I think that we can tend
to reassociate those jewels — that kind of jewel belt with pregnancy.

37:55

Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger,
however, did portray visible pregnancy

38:03

within family groups including in this
complex dynastic image of Anne Hopton.

38:10

Now, Anne had been the widow of Henry II
Baron of Wentworth and he had died in 1593.

38:18

So, she appears here behind
the couple’s three children. So, from the left, they’re
Thomas, Henry and Jane Wentworth.

38:29

And because the little boys are
so young, they’re wearing skirts as little boys did at this period.

38:36

And this painting which is dated
1596 on the foot of Henry’s chair,

38:44

not visible at this distance
but it’s very much there.

38:49

1596 was shortly after Anne had remarried to Sir
William Pope who later became the Earl of Downe.

38:57

And Anne is in fact clearly now pregnant and
her bump must be the next Sir William Pope.

39:08

They just kept the name. And he was born as we know in
1596, the year on this painting.

39:17

So, she and her children gaze out at the viewer. And we might surmise that the viewer is
the new husband with whom she’s embarked

39:27

on a second family at the age of about 35. And her clothing, a silver white bodice and
sleeves with an open sleeveless black gown.

39:38

So, what was you’re– what we’re
seeing here is just really the sort of the gown just strips either
side of her shoulders.

39:47

That very much echoes the clothing
worn by the Tate unknown woman.

39:54

So, these two portraits are roughly,
you know, from roughly the same date.

39:59

And here again, we’re seeing those pearls. And in this case, you see that her
ropes of pearls rest over her baby bump.

40:07

And they’re actually emphasizing the outline. It’s another device to make
sure that we get the message.

40:14

Because a number of examples by Marcus
Gheeraerts the Younger survived,

40:19

it looks as if he may have been seen
as a specialist in pregnancy portraits.

40:26

This portrait of another
unidentified sitter is dated 1620.

40:31

And you can see really how his style has
developed, how his approach has changed.

40:37

It’s more naturalistic and with this
very beautifully rendered gesture of the hand on the bump.

40:46

And indeed, into his old age, Gheeraerts
was still receiving such commissions

40:51

such as this portrait of an
Arlington Lady Fanshawe of around 1628

40:59

and had married Sir Thomas
Fanshawe in September 1627 and must have become pregnant
almost immediately.

41:07

The record shows that less than 10 months
later, she gave birth to a daughter.

41:12

But she died and she was
buried very soon afterwards. So, accordingly, this portrait must
have been made in spring or summer 1628.

41:24

So, once again, it’s the evidence
of a woman’s death that helps to provide the dating for the painting.

41:32

Producing healthy children was of course
even more essential within royal marriages.

41:37

At her arrival in England in 1625, Charles
the I’s French Queen Henrietta Maria brought

41:45

with her different French styles of clothing,
fashions that were soon adopted in London.

41:53

Unlike the narrow lacing of the Jacobean
period, they included a bodice design

41:59

that could accommodate the maternal body as it
grew giving the figure an ambiguous outline.

42:05

And in fashionable coat portraiture accordingly,
it became less clear whether a sitter was

42:12

to be identified as with child or not. So, for the rest of this talk, I’m going to
be focussing on some of the portraits painted

42:22

by the Flemish artist Anthony Van Dyck during
the years that he lived and worked in Britain.

42:28

So, that’s from 1632 to 1641.

42:33

He made a brief short break back in the low
countries between ’34 and ’35, but 1632 to ’41.

42:44

And I’ll be considering how
gestures, meaning-bearing objects and especially textiles seemed to be deployed
to signal pregnancy in his portrait to be read

42:55

or to be read in the context of
that hope for dynastic success. In spring 1632, when van Dyck arrived in
London, he was knighted and appointed, quote,

43:07

“principle painter to Charles
I and Henrietta Maria.”

43:13

As the son of a silk trader, van Dyck had a
finely tuned understanding of the importance

43:19

of dress in portraiture as the work
of Emilie Gordenker has made clear.

43:26

Curiously, in a later and somewhat doubtful
biographical note, Cornelis de Bie claimed

43:32

that van Dyck’s mother, Maria Cuyper,
had been an embroiderer who, quote,

43:37

“painted with her needle” especially during
her pregnancy with van Dyck implying I think

43:45

that this activity had in some way
imprinted her creativity upon the child

43:52

that she was carrying, a nice
kind of fantastical idea.

43:59

Aided by a team of assistants
in his London studio, van Dyck was soon busy producing portraits
of the royal couple and their growing family,

44:08

as well as of many other
sitters connected with the court. Excluded by her Catholicism
from an official political role,

44:19

Henrietta Maria’s main task was motherhood. Between March 1629 and June 1644, she
had nine pregnancies that came to term.

44:31

And two of those babies were stillborn. Attempts have been made to connect the likely
dates of her portraits with her pregnancies.

44:41

And certainly when the royal couple’s
collections were inventoried for sale

44:46

after the execution of Charles I in 1649, one
work in the collection was described as, quote,

44:55

the picture of the Queen
when she was with child. And it was valued at five shillings.

45:02

Sold in April 1650, this
painting remains unidentified.

45:10

In this example by van Dyck, the Queen’s
distinctive cradling gesture has long been

45:17

presumed to allude to forthcoming parenthood. It was painted specifically for Cardinal
Barberini in Rome to whom in December 1636,

45:28

George Con, who was the papal agent in London,
wrote to say that the Queen was waiting

45:35

to take leave of him “as soon as
the portrait for you is finished.”

45:41

And on 17th of March 1637, just three
months after George Con’s letter,

45:48

the Queen gave birth to Princess Anne. And we know that by 1639,
this portrait was definitely

45:55

in Cardinal Barberini’s collection,
where it was inventoried.

46:02

Van Dyck very rarely signed or
inscribed his English portraits,

46:07

and he almost never dated
them, inconveniently for us.

46:13

So as a result, it can be unclear
when exactly they were painted. And thus, it can be hard to correlate them
precisely with events in a sitter’s life.

46:23

And so in this case, with known pregnancies.

46:29

But as I’ve shown, van Dyck had
come to a court where portraits that made pregnancy visible were
widely known, were appearing.

46:38

In van Dyck’s same works such as pregnancy,
seems to be conveyed by symbolic gestures.

46:47

A later 17th-century inventory described
this portrait, thus, “Mary, Lady Verney,

46:55

her right hand on her belly within with
child of EV, a white gown and blue mantle.”

47:03

The sitter, Mary Blacknall, an heiress,
had been married in 1629 at the age of 13.

47:12

She first gave birth three years later,
but to a child who died in infancy.

47:17

Married to have six further children,
only two of whom lived to adulthood.

47:24

Her eldest son, Edmund Verney or EV, in
that reference, was born in December 1636.

47:33

And thus, it seems that Mary was not only
painted by van Dyck while she was pregnant

47:39

but also that her distinctive gesture and
her direct gaze out are a statement of that.

47:47

And since the inventory tells us that, that
was evidently recognized as such at the time.

47:55

So alerted by this, let’s consider the hand
gestures in other female portraits by van Dyck.

48:04

Although it’s quite important
not to go overboard with this and consider each potential
example on a case by case basis

48:12

because a hand gesture might merely allude
to the promise of hope for fertility,

48:20

as in van Dyck’s portrait of Henrietta
Maria and Charles I, eldest daughter, Mary,

48:26

here depicted at the age of nine
just after her marriage in May 1641.

48:32

So the young Dutch Prince William of Orange. And van Dyck’s double portrait of the
young couple was one of the last works

48:40

that he produced with his studio team
before his death in London in December 1641.

48:48

So, obviously, that gesture,
as I say, is to sort of hope for future fertility in the case of this child.

49:00

I’m showing you a black and white image of
what’s thought to be a portrait of Catherine, the daughter and heiress of Horace 1st Lord
Vere of Tilbury, who’d married Oliver St. John

49:11

in March 1634, and her son, the future Sir
John St. John, was born in around 1637,

49:20

stylistically a plausible
date for this portrait.

49:25

van Dyck was not a painter who used
complex or numerous symbolic accessories,

49:31

but his female portraits — but in his female
portraits, pink or red roses frequently appear,

49:38

either graying bushes or presented in baskets,
or in glass vases, or as individual cut blooms.

49:49

As I’ve already said, roses
were rich in associations. Since classical times, they’d been
linked with the goddess Venus and, thus,

49:57

with love and subsequently as in the
portrait of Mary Tudor, they were associated

50:04

with the Virgin Mary, the rose without a thorn. And all these meanings were widely understood.

50:12

So when van Dyck depicts a sitter ostentatiously
holding a rose in front of her womb in the way

50:18

that Catherine does, it seems likely that this
gesture too maybe a signifier of pregnancy.

50:25

Another strategy deployed by van Dyck to
convey pregnancy may have been the loose mantle

50:33

that conceals the outline of the sitter’s body. It’s been suggested that this unfinished
half-length portrait of a woman

50:42

who presses a gauze scarf against her apparently
distended body may be Rachel de Ruvigny,

50:50

the fourth Countess of Southampton, and that
it was perhaps painted in around 1639 or 1640.

50:59

1640 was the year in which the Countess
died in child bed at the age of 37,

51:04

having given birth to five
children in six years.

51:10

Indeed, from her marriage in 1634 onwards,
she had been almost permanently with child.

51:22

Alice, Lady Borlase, was married
on the 4th of December 1637, shortly after which van Dyck painted
portraits of her and her husband.

51:33

In this case, roses are included in it
in a glass vase as you see on the left.

51:40

But more importantly, the gesture with
which Lady Borlase draws her mantle,

51:45

partly across her stomach, seems to demand
that we recognize it as significant.

51:53

By the late 1630s, as Emilie Gordenker
has shown, van Dyck had invented

51:59

for his British female portraits, unless
specifically fashionable and, thus,

52:04

more timeless form of attire,
which echoed portraits by the 16th-century Venetian painter
Titian, whose work was so much admired

52:14

at the Caroline Court, the court of Charles I.

52:20

And this sitter is shown here in just
such a timeless gown with no lace collar.

52:27

Lace collars was so time-consuming to paint. So it’s time effective if van Dyck
doesn’t include them in the portraits

52:37

and persuades the sitters that not
including them is a sign of their specialness

52:43

that they are sort of in the world of Titian.

52:52

So she wears such a gown and she has a
swathe of silk obscuring her bodily outline.

52:58

So in this portrait, we see both a loose
mantle and an emphatic hand gesture.

53:06

So I’m suggesting possibly indicating pregnancy. And unfortunately, it’s not
clear who the sitter is.

53:13

There’s a later inscription
added upper left, Mrs. Howard,

53:18

but there were quite a number
of Howard women at court. And it’s not certain who exactly this sitter is.

53:28

And finally, this double portrait by van
Dyck, now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow,

53:34

shows two sisters-in-law and his thought
to date from late 1638, early 1639.

53:43

As Malcolm Rogers pointed out 30 years ago,
in early summer 1638, the woman on the right,

53:51

Katherine Howard, one of those Howard women,
the daughter of the 2nd Earl of Suffolk,

53:58

had secretly married Lord George
Stuart, Seigneur of Aubigny.

54:03

And Lord George was the brother of the woman on
the left, Frances Stuart, Countess of Portland.

54:11

And in order to marry Lord George, Katherine had
controversially converted to Roman Catholicism

54:19

on the 7th of March 1639 and, thus, early in
her marriage, she gave birth to a son, Charles,

54:27

and her cradling gesture here similar to
that seen in the slightly earlier portrait

54:35

of Henrietta Maria in the yellow gown is
thought to be an indication of that pregnancy.

54:45

Frances herself, the woman on the
left, meanwhile, gave birth on the 19th

54:51

of May, two months after Katherine. And so presumably she, too, should
be recognized as being pregnant here,

54:59

though I think we have definitely
not actually been shown that. And once again, you see the ubiquitous pink red
roses here being gathered, symbolic of Venus,

55:12

of love being gathered from a
bush and being held in the hand.

55:19

So I’m fully aware that one can get
carried away trying to spot gestures that indicate pregnancy in
van Dyck’s brushes portraits.

55:28

The hand on the stomach, the hand on the stomach
holding an inverted rose, the cradling gesture,

55:34

the loose textile held in such a way
as to obscure the outline of the body. Van Dyck’s failure to date
his portraits doesn’t help.

55:44

But I would contend that if the gesture in the
portrait can be backed up by documented evidence

55:51

of a pregnancy at a plausible time,
it’s worth considering the question.

55:59

The study of portraiture and pregnancy
together offers a fresh lens through which

56:05

to look at history and at art history. It encourages us to rethink the context
in which many past portraits were made,

56:14

as well as the life experiences
of women sitters. If we can establish that a pregnancy was present
at the time, whether the choice has been made

56:24

to make it visible in the picture or
not, it can alter our understanding of the intentions behind an image.

56:31

Once we consider that so many women of the elite
conducted busy public lives, lives at court,

56:39

while repeatedly pregnant, with all the
bodily changes and health challenges

56:44

that that involved, especially prior to modern
obstetrics, our view of those women’s roles

56:51

and activities needs to be adjusted. And painted portraits can be
one route to that understanding.

56:59

Thank you. [ Applause ]

57:16

>> OK. Am I on? Yes. Thank you very much, Karen. And I can invite anyone here in the room.

57:24

If you have any questions, feel free to
come and ask them here at this microphone

57:31

that we’ve positioned here in the back. And so while everyone’s gathering their
thoughts, I’m also collecting the questions

57:41

that people are asking online, and
I saw a few were already coming in. But I thought I might sneak in
with one of my own questions first.

57:50

And I was really struck by, you know,
that this really presence specter

58:01

of mortality in a way around pregnancies. And as you were talking, I was really
starting to think about this decision

58:09

to commission portraits, possibly aligning with
pregnancy, if one were to think about the risks

58:17

that were involved in it and sort of the desire
to have portraits painted potentially of women.

58:22

I was wondering if you had ever wondered about
that, this sort of relationship between a moment

58:29

of commissioning and pregnancy even
if it’s not shown but to -. >> Absolutely.

58:35

I mean, I do think we can also see them
in a way almost as memento-mori images. I think that death is the unspoken
constant presence in these portraits.

58:53

So the portrait records the features
of someone who might die in childbed.

59:07

They also — more prosaically, it’s
recording someone who is part of your family.

59:13

You may have — you know,
these marriages are dynastic. So you’ve married into a
particular family, you know,

59:19

and an heiress, you might want to record that.

59:25

And by showing the bump. I think that’s what’s going on in the
portrait of Mildred Cecil that, you know,

59:34

they’ve had such a terrible time. These
unsuccessful pregnancies and dead babies.

59:41

So that it’s kind of — the
portrait is kind of saying, yes, we can — you know, we do get pregnant.

59:47

And here is the evidence. So I think, you know, and I linked
them with those mother’s legacy texts.

59:57

I think they — those really reveal motivation.

1:00:02

They are very popular at this period. So, yes, I think death is
always an element in these.

1:00:18

>> Yeah. If there’s no immediate second
question and please don’t be shy, I have a few questions here
that were posted online.

1:00:26

So the first one I have is
for the Anthonis Mor portrait of Queen Mary I, you mentioned
that three exists.

1:00:34

Is the original — if the original is in the
Prado where are the other two located?

1:00:39

Are they copies of Mor? Or were they also painted by him? >> Well, one belongs to the Marquess of
Northampton and is in a British country house.

1:00:51

And one is in the Isabella Stewart Gardner. And they’re all slightly different,
but they’re all painted by Mor.

1:01:02

This raises what’s really quite a sort of hot
question, I think, at the moment, which is,

1:01:10

for so long, people have assumed if
you have multiple versions of an image,

1:01:15

that there’s an original and
then the others are copies. But we’re increasingly coming
to understand that copies —

1:01:23

that versions were painted simultaneously. There are all sorts of examples cropping up
of portraits that are virtually the same.

1:01:30

And that were clearly being painted at
the same time and both have pentimenti.

1:01:37

So the sort of question of which is the prime
one, I think, in this case, is a difficult one.

1:01:47

And probably there wasn’t a prime.

1:01:56

>> OK, so I have another question. What happened to the pregnancy portraits at
and after the restoration that the inability

1:02:05

of Queen Catherine of Braganza to
sustain a pregnancy have any effects on the popularity of the genre?

1:02:12

>>That’s a very interesting question. We don’t really seem to see examples.

1:02:19

Of course, after the restoration,
we — and that’s — we’re thinking about the work of Peter Lely,
Jacob Huysmans and then Nathalie Nella.

1:02:30

And Lely sort of particularly introduces this —

1:02:38

building really on van Dyck’s
introduction of sort of timeless stress. With Lely, women are wearing
kind of very loose garments.

1:02:49

So the bodily outline really
isn’t what you’re seeing. You’re seeing a lot of shoulders
and sort of chest and flesh,

1:02:59

and almost kind of they’re almost night — well, nightdresses but that meaning of
term for sort of loose informal garments.

1:03:09

So I think it’s partly a question of the
fashion and the fashion used in painting,

1:03:17

which is this timeless, and a change of mood.

1:03:26

>>So I will just keep going until someone
comes and takes this mic away for me.

1:03:32

The next one is other than pearls, are there
any other jewels that show up frequently

1:03:38

as symbols of pregnancy or fertility? >>Well, I’m definitely not saying
that pearls are symbolic of fertility.

1:03:46

They — that’s — if that — if I
gave that impression, they do —

1:03:52

pearls are ubiquitous in elite
Western European portraiture.

1:03:58

And they certainly appear in
Britain English portraits.

1:04:03

And in the 1590s, they’re worn by
men as well and there are portraits of men in garments sewn with pearls.

1:04:12

So they are to do with status
and fashionability. But I think the lady covered
in pearls, I think she’s so —

1:04:24

you know, the pearls are so extraordinarily
kind of evident that I think making the analogy

1:04:33

with the sort of precious pearl
of purity idea is worth it but —

1:04:41

is worth making, but pearls are ubiquitous
and sourced from a range of sources.

1:04:47

>> And were there any — just to sort of to
go back to the second part of the question,

1:04:58

are there any material specifically
that could be associated with pregnancy?

1:05:04

Or is that not really — is there
not really evidence for that? >> Textiles clothing materials.

1:05:11

I don’t think so. I mean, what — you know, there are images — there are a few images of women
holding children in their arms.

1:05:22

So that’s a later stage. And then you do — they’re quite rare,
but the babies are swaddled and they tend

1:05:30

to have a red cloth, a bearing
cloth — red cloth with gold thread.

1:05:37

But in terms of — basically what these women
are doing is wearing the most luxurious textiles

1:05:45

that they can afford, most luxurious
and fashionable that they can afford. And also because there are sumptuary laws,
there are laws which restrict the fabrics

1:05:57

that different levels of society can wear. So if you can wear red and if you can wear
metal braid because of your elevated position

1:06:08

in society, you will be wearing
that in your portrait. >> Right, thank you.

1:06:18

This talk has been really exciting. My question is about the gesture, which I find
really interesting because you were saying

1:06:25

that sometimes it could indicate a
pregnancy but then sometimes it might not.

1:06:32

And I was wondering how much evidence
do you need to confirm the pregnancy?

1:06:39

Is the gesture enough? Is it the gesture together with the position? Or do you also need evidence
external to the painting to confirm

1:06:47

that it’s actually of a pregnant woman? >>Well, I think if you can
get the evidence external

1:06:56

to the painting, then it’s much more likely. I mean, I — the key document is that inventory,
Lady Verney surviving portrait and a descript —

1:07:06

that’s a later 17th century,
not much later inventory,

1:07:11

which says that it shows her with child. So it was soon enough after
the picture was painted

1:07:18

and it was made, you know, in the household. So that picture shows her with child.

1:07:24

So that really gives us the cue
to venture to say — plus her — so taken with her expression,
which is very direct.

1:07:34

But I feel that one does really — if one can get external evidence,
you know, that’s the key thing.

1:07:43

But because his pictures aren’t dated, you know, it’s really inconvenient
that he didn’t date them.

1:07:53

So in terms of dating his portraits, we
go on the fashions depicted and the way

1:08:00

in which his renditions, you
know, all artists develop. So we might look and think, “Well,
that’s really late in his career.”

1:08:08

And also when we stopped seeing lace, when we — when the garments become sort
of more of this timeless.

1:08:16

But I’m very — I’m — hope I sort of indicated
how sort of cautious I feel we have to be,

1:08:23

but I still feel it’s worth
proposing it you know?

1:08:35

>> I’m hoping that this is
a fair question to ask.

1:08:41

I’m wondering if there are any depictions
of pregnancy outside of portraits of known

1:08:48

or once known women when they think of some
of the literature from the period like Duchess

1:08:56

of Malfi or Measure for Measure
pregnancy in the —

1:09:04

in those fictions are all about something
problematic, something dramatic, something —

1:09:12

information that’s withheld
because the woman is the sure side. And I wonder if you see that
elsewhere in the visual arts.

1:09:23

>>Getting back to what I said
at the very beginning about — I mean, that’s a very interesting question.

1:09:29

I was saying that it’s a matter of choices. And I think this is a period in which
choices are made within a range of purposes.

1:09:39

And I think these portraits are — I can’t see
evidence that these are problematic pregnancies

1:09:51

or controversial pregnancies,
pregnancies outside marriage. I think, you know, these
painting portraits are —

1:09:59

they’re serving a, potentially a public purpose. So I think it’s, you know, it’s
a normative sort of situation.

1:10:16

But yes, I mean, in literature of course,
secret pregnancy, secret pregnancies are, you know, that’s a kind of key theme.

1:10:25

And of course, this is a
period in which, you know, pregnancies outside marriage
intensely problematic.

1:10:33

And there are all sorts of women at court who
become pregnant, have to go off to the country.

1:10:42

And yeah, I mean, this is a period in which
there are quite a lot of unexpected pregnancies

1:10:49

in the context that people
don’t want to have them. But I can’t see that painted portrait — a
portrait would be painted in that context.

1:11:06

>> So I have another question online. This is the issue of the
women’s gaze interests me.

1:11:13

We’ve seen no special modesty in your examples
or other, in fact, frank addresses to the viewer.

1:11:18

Do you have an opinion about
this aspect of the portraits?

1:11:27

>> Well, this portrait — I mean, I’ve been — I’ve posed sort of number of
different reasons for them.

1:11:35

And of course, celebrate — you know, with crossed fingers celebration
in a way is one of them.

1:11:42

And a pregnancy is an outcome
that is looked for. I mean, for women, you know,
their roles are limited.

1:11:50

And as I said, for Henrietta Maria,
it’s basically motherhood and pregnancy.

1:11:55

So I think the frank dress is, you know,
perfectly what we would expect because it’s,

1:12:02

you know, I am doing, well, God’s work, as I
said, and I’m doing what my principal role is.

1:12:12

So I mean, this isn’t a period in which we
might think about sort of later Victorian,

1:12:18

where pregnancy was, you know, a
matter of modesty, of staying at home,

1:12:24

of nobody talking about it, that
is a later sort of development.

1:12:31

And, yes, I think, you know, it becomes
something that we might think is associated

1:12:43

with — society associates it with
something embarrassing or shameful.

1:12:48

That’s later. That’s not this period.

1:12:58

>>And then there is also
something that’s more of a comment that maybe you would want to comment on.

1:13:04

Someone says during the 17th
century, puritanism was spreading at a popular — at the popular level in Britain.

1:13:11

This appears to have no influence
on the portraiture of the elites.

1:13:16

>> Well, I mean, we have — we do have portraits
of women modestly dressed in black with covered,

1:13:28

you know, black or — and with a sort of
linen up to the neck and covered hair.

1:13:39

I’m showing, you know, the
most elite level really. And also, I’m really showing a period before
we might say puritanism becomes as it were sort

1:13:56

of widespread or becomes
widespread expressed in dress.

1:14:09

>> Someone wants to know are “baby
bump portraits” otherwise similar

1:14:16

to other portraits of women in the same era? >> Well, what a good question and basically
they are, except that there’s a bump.

1:14:28

And thinking of Mildred Cecil,
she, I’m sure, is wearing —

1:14:36

and I take my cue from dress historians. You know, I’ve worked with so many
really fantastic dress historians.

1:14:45

So what she is wearing — she’s
not wearing maternity wear. She’s wearing the most luxurious, most
fashionable garment but different underpinning.

1:14:55

I mean, we use the word corset now probably. They use the word bodies.

1:15:02

But women wore — they always
wore bodies corsets as it were.

1:15:10

And you — in pregnancy, you would
be wearing different corsetry,

1:15:15

something that was looser,
more sort of expanded. So you’re wearing your non-pregnancy
wear but over a differently shaped body.

1:15:30

>>I was interested in the fact that — anyway, it’s been a lovely lecture,
I just wanted to say as well.

1:15:40

>> Thank you. >>Very interesting. I was interested that the portrait
of Mildred Cecil, which was 1563.

1:15:50

The next one after that was the woman with
pearls all over, unidentified in the 1590s.

1:15:59

And then we go forward to
Stuart portraiture, which — in the period that Marcus
Gheeraerts was painting.

1:16:08

And it’s interesting — I think
it may be something to think about the Queen Elizabeth wasn’t going to get
pregnant, and that perhaps it was unpopular

1:16:21

to actually do a pregnancy portrait until the
period after she had passed that possibility.

1:16:30

And — anyway, I just was interested that
there seems to be a period of about 40 years

1:16:38

or so between the two or
maybe 30 between the two. And do you notice that in the
period following the Stuart period,

1:16:48

when there were more royal babies
around, that it became more of a thing?

1:16:54

Is that — >> Well, I’ve selected — I think possibly
that gap is a slightly misleading one.

1:17:04

So I’ve selected examples. I’ve selected the most interesting
and beautiful examples for you.

1:17:11

So I wouldn’t say that there is actually a gap. But so many of the pregnancy portraits
that, you know, have come to my attention

1:17:22

over the years are of unknown sitters
and some are higher quality than others.

1:17:29

So what I’m doing is really showing, you
know, fine and interesting examples and,

1:17:35

of course, if I can, of identified sitters. So that — you’ve pointed out a gap that I think
isn’t actually there accepting the way I’ve

1:17:44

structured the lecture. I do think in the mix of many different
motivations, the concern to have a queen

1:17:58

on the throne, to have a woman on the throne,
and a woman’s role is seen as being a mother.

1:18:06

And of course, everyone’s anxious
as to who will succeed Elizabeth. And she — as you know, right up to the
last minute, she won’t name a successor.

1:18:16

There are, oops, various sort of candidates. And very wisely, she doesn’t name them so
nobody can sort of accrete around them.

1:18:29

So I do think that the very visible bumps
could be in the context of having a queen

1:18:37

on the throne, who, for a long time,
it’s hoped will become a mother.

1:18:48

>> A really interesting question here. Are there paintings of women
who were not part of the elites?

1:18:54

And I might add to that, if they’re
not paintings, are there other media

1:18:59

where this experience of the
non-elite women is maybe captured?

1:19:06

>> Well, painted portraits
tend to be of various elites.

1:19:14

So royalty and court figures and I — that I’ve really been showing you
sumptuous portraits of court figures.

1:19:22

And then we also have, as it were, the
middle class, you know, some of whom of very,

1:19:30

very rich merchant families and very,
very concerned about dynastic matters

1:19:36

in exactly the same way and often richly
dressed within what’s allowed for their status.

1:19:46

But lower down the social scale,
you’re not really getting —

1:19:56

you know, necessarily getting
portraits that survive. And I can’t think of examples
that relate to pregnancy.

1:20:10

But so much is a matter of what hasn’t survived. I mean, everything we say about paintings —
portraits of this period, we have to qualify

1:20:20

that things may have existed
that no longer exist.

1:20:27

The Visitation, I think, lingers on so
that those are representations of —

1:20:38

to pregnant women meeting and embracing or touching each other’s
stomachs, things like that.

1:20:44

And we do find these in a range of media. And it doesn’t seem — it seems to be
a theme that is acceptable in books,

1:20:55

in book illustrations and things like that.

1:21:02

And those women — those representations
can be dressed quite simply.

1:21:11

Yeah.

1:21:17

>>Someone is also asking a question about the
image that’s up on the screen right now saying,

1:21:22

“Was it common to have two
women in the same portrait? Or was it because of their husband’s
preference or the cost of hiring an artist?”

1:21:31

>>Yes, the cost of van Dyck is.

1:21:36

That’s such an interesting question. And what it actually brings up is the
fact that this is something van Dyck —

1:21:48

we have got some examples in Britain before
van Dyck of people seated side by side

1:21:55

who are not husband — you know, a double
portrait but not of a husband and wife.

1:22:01

We have those as well. And so I — this is something that van Dyck
finds but he really introduces in a bigger way

1:22:07

to British art, portraits of two
men together or two women together.

1:22:14

And the women may be different ages,
but two men together, very common.

1:22:20

So they’re known as friendship portraits. Now, these two women are
intimately linked by family.

1:22:26

So that is the kind of connection
that we might see.

1:22:31

So double portraits are — he
doesn’t completely introduce them but he very much takes them forward.

1:22:38

So it’s a very van Dyck thing.

1:22:46

>> And this might follow up nicely. Someone asks, most of the paintings showed a
woman alone, was it rare to include the father?

1:22:54

>> Well, husband and wife portraits
do tend to be two separate portraits

1:23:06

and that’s a Northern European, I mean, very
much in low countries art husband and wife.

1:23:15

And with the woman on the right-hand side and
the man on the left-hand side, as I mentioned,

1:23:22

when we were thinking about Mildred Cecil. And I do think that it is plausible that she
did have — there was a portrait of William,

1:23:32

which is now lost because
of the half coat of arms.

1:23:37

But I haven’t found any examples of paired
portraits

1:23:46

with the man and with the woman pregnant. But I assume that — I mean, the lady with
pearls, you know, she might have had —

1:23:59

and once again, I think it’s a matter
of survival so we can’t be sure.

1:24:10

>>And so someone else is also wondering about
a period past the 16th and the 17th century.

1:24:16

So would portraits of pregnant women continue?

1:24:22

And — or was this a particularly popular
time for pregnancy to be depicted?

1:24:31

And if so, do you have any
theories about why this might be? >>Well, I do think this is a
particular period in which we see them,

1:24:41

and then fashions change, society changes.

1:24:47

And I think there’s a wonderful example which
was drawn of sort of later 18th century,

1:24:56

which was drawn to my attention by
a colleague in London, Kate Retford.

1:25:02

And it’s explored in the book. So it’s Teresa Palmer.

1:25:08

And she is from quite an — quite a
cosmopolitan international family. And she marries her husband who’s a member
of the Palmer family, of Saltram in Devon.

1:25:22

And there are a number of — in Joshua
Reynolds’ sittings book, appointments book,

1:25:28

she has a number of sittings over
about an 18-month period with him. And she already has — she
and her husband have a son.

1:25:38

And so she’s sitting for a portrait
being depicted with her son.

1:25:44

But there’s the — these wonderful letters
which survive in which she’s writing to her brother and her sister is writing.

1:25:53

And — so Mr. Palmer wants a
full-length portrait of her.

1:25:59

And he wants it specifically for
the Saloon at Saltram, this house, which they’ve got Robert Adam
in to do the decorations.

1:26:08

So it’s a sort of fashionable upgrade. And he wants a full-length portrait of her

1:26:13

to match a full-length portrait
of a male ancestor of his. It’s very, very interesting and he wants it now.

1:26:20

So she writes in her letter, “It may seem
an improper time that I should be sitting

1:26:26

to Mr. Reynolds, but my husband really wants
this picture,” and her sister writes the same.

1:26:33

It may seem an improper time. So I think that gives us a cue that it’s just —

1:26:39

you’re not going to see pregnancy
in painted portraits in the 1770s.

1:26:46

And what’s so interesting is
that the painting survives. And it’s a full-length portrait
and she’s standing not —

1:26:54

there’s a kind of mantle around her. But she looks tall and slender.

1:27:00

And she says that — yeah, she says — well, it’s Joshua Reynolds
tells her, “It’s fine to sit.”

1:27:08

And he — she says something about he will —
you know, he’ll deal with that section later.

1:27:13

I paraphrase very broadly. But interesting, there’s also — Joshua Reynolds
writes to someone and says, again, I paraphrase,

1:27:24

something like, “She is at that
state in which women don’t look so good.” So he’s saying one
thing to her but, actually,

1:27:33

he sees it as a problem and unattractive.

1:27:38

So I take it that that society’s view. So it’s — many changes have taken place.

1:27:50

>>So there are many more questions. I’ll pick one last one and we
will forward all the questions

1:27:56

that we’ve received to the speaker. So if your question wasn’t read
aloud, then it will be communicated.

1:28:04

But I guess the final question I’ll pose is
whether or not there are also examples

1:28:16

where we know that a woman is
pregnant and that the pregnancy or the baby bump was purposefully
concealed or not shown in the portrait.

1:28:24

>>Sorry, I didn’t totally
catch the beginning of that. >> Oh, sorry. That’s if there are examples of portraits
where we know that the woman was pregnant

1:28:33

and that there’s evidence that the baby — sorry, the baby bump or the
pregnancy is purposefully concealed.

1:28:40

>>Well, that is very much the
default position and as it were,

1:28:45

the position that Joshua Reynolds
— you know, his solution. And the portraits that show the bump
are the anomalous, the unusual ones.

1:28:56

And I’m sure that, you know, many portraits in
which women are tightly laced into their sort

1:29:04

of triangular bodies corsets may
— sittings may have taken place

1:29:11

at a time when a woman was pregnant. As I say, it’s, you know, in a way, what
we need is a precise dating for a portrait,

1:29:24

which we can correlate with a
precise date of a pregnancy.

1:29:29

And that — you know, that’s
quite difficult to find.

1:29:34

You know, Mary Tudor is gold dust,
really, in this kind of research.

1:29:42

>> OK. Well, I would like to once again
thank Karen Hearn very much for her talk. Thank you very much.

1:29:48

[ Applause ]

1:30:00

And I would like to invite everyone to
the reception which will last until 8:30. And also our galleries will be open
until 9:00 so you’ll have an opportunity

1:30:09

to walk around our exhibitions as well. Thank you very much.

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