The Parliamentary Art Collection is a national collection which documents the history of Parliament and British politics.
The collection is owned jointly by the House of Commons and the House of Lords and is administered by a committee in either house.
Lecture Transcript
Clare Cowan, Head of Public Information and Outreach Services: Good morning everyone, and welcome to this, the first lecture on the Art Collection at Parliament as part of Parliament’s Open Lecture Series. My name is Clare Cowan; I’m Head of the Public Information team. I’m not going to speak for long, because trust me, Malcolm is far more exciting. Just to say that this lecture is part of a series of lectures from Parliament to open up access to procedural information about it, and there will be a number of lectures following on, hopefully many more about the Art Collection.
The other job I have is very glamorous. It’s to tell you a) where the toilets are, and that is to the left for women and right for gentlemen on this corridor of the building, b) to advise you that as yet we don’t know of any fire drills this morning, so if the fire alarm goes, with the best spoken enunciation you’ll ever hear, please do follow myself and other staff members out of the building. We don’t anticipate that this will be a problem.
And thirdly, thanks to the cutting edge technology we have throughout Parliament, we cannot actually isolate Malcolm’s microphone. So for people who are taking the role of MPs this morning, sat on the horseshoe, or for witnesses sat on those desks there, your microphones are live, which is obviously very helpful for the question and answer session, but it does mean that if you need to cough or sneeze, please do turn away from the microphone.
The lecture will be filmed this morning and it will go up on the Parliamentary YouTube channel afterwards for other people to be able to access it. However the Q&A will not be filmed. Malcolm will be speaking for about 45 minutes this morning, and then there’s opportunity for Q&A afterwards. And with that, I’d like to hand over to Malcolm. Thank you.
Malcolm Hay, Curator of the Parliamentary Art Collection: Thank you Clare. Just a brief synopsis about the Parliamentary Art Collection to begin. It’s the national collection of art relating to the history of Parliament, and it contains images of important Parliamentary events and Parliamentary figures, Parliamentarians, who have played an important role in making Parliament what it is today, and it covers also British historical subjects. In terms of numbers, we have just of 8,000 works of art; we’ve got a couple of them in the room here. Over 80 per cent of our collection are spread throughout the buildings of the Parliamentary estate. So it’s very much a working collection.
Slide 1
(03:05) The earliest pieces date back to the medieval age; in the middle of the slide we’ve got up you can see a medieval king looking out of the centre. The major holdings we have date from the 18th, the 19th and the 20th centuries, and we have significant contemporary holdings also.
The idea of the talk this morning is to look at two distinct areas of building up and developing the collection. I am going to be looking at the Victorian period (that’s the period 1841 up until the mid-1860’s) and then jumping forward 90 years or so to the period 1956 to the present day. That’s quite a lot to achieve in 45 minutes and we are going to have to be very selective.
Slide 2
(04:00) Let’s begin with the Victorian age and beginning with, on the left, a Portrait of Queen Victoria, and on the right, Prince Albert. These are copied portraits by the German artist Franz Winterhalter. They were painted in 1859. These particular ones were commissioned by Queen Victoria as a gift. They were given to Prince Dalip Singh so the early years of their life were spent hanging in the Palace in India. In 1911, they were acquired by the House of Lords and now they hang in the robing room in the House of Lords.
The building of the Victorian Palace began after the fire of 1834, which of course destroyed many of the earlier buildings dating back to medieval times that formed the early Palace. The idea of providing suitable works of art for the new building was hotly debated.
There had been a feeling since the 1830s that there was a need for government patronage of arts to avoid Britain falling behind its European neighbours, particularly France and German, and in 1841 a Select Committee was set up to consider the promotion of the fine arts in this country. That led in turn in November of that year to the setting up of the Fine Arts Commission that would look after and indeed get heavily involved in the works of art for the Victorian Palace.
Prince Albert, on the right, was to be the chairman. He was of intellect, taste and ideas. He had travelled widely in Europe, he had studied the great art collections. He had come to Britain, and he had married Queen Victoria only a year beforehand and in 1841 he was the chairman of this new Commission. He proved a very astute choice, and there is no doubt that his presence added considerable importance to the schemes of art at Westminster. We are going to hear a bit more about him later on in the lecture.
What was the role of the Fine Arts Commission? Well, it was pretty wide ranging. They had the task of filling the walls and interiors of this major public building. This was a building that would illustrate the nation’s rich history, and the works of art would need to be of a status and quality to fit in with this major public building. They would also need to build on and continue on the long standing tradition of outstanding fine art commissioned for the early palace of Westminster buildings since the medieval times.
So it became an important period of state patronage of the arts, and it went on more or less for a twenty year period. It was about Britain, it was about British artists. All the artists employed at the Houses of Parliament had to be home grown talent.
I mention that because there was a heavy German influence and there were concerns, especially when Peter Cornelius, one of the German Nazarene school of artists, had been invited over from Germany to London to give informal advice to the Fine Arts Commissioners.
Slide 3
(07:37) Just so we get an idea of what the Germans were doing in parallel with what was going on here, this is the Residenz in Munich. This is part of the lavish decoration for King Ludwig I of Bavaria. These are large wall paintings illustrating German history and this particular instance is the German Nibelungenlied league, that early 12th Century mythological and indeed early German historical scheme.
They were being painted by the German artist Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld between the period 1828 to 1834. So these were well known in Britain and indeed Schnorr von Carolsfeld carried on painting between 1843 and 1867, so exactly fitting in with the schemes of art at the Houses of Parliament.
Albert was well aware of what these German artists were doing. He knew very well the Nazarene School, he knew the artists such as Overbeck and Cornelius and indeed Schnorr von Carolsfeld. But it would have been unthinkable for German artists to be brought over to Britain, either to supervise what was going on or indeed to paint and be commissioned to paint in the building.
Slide 4
(09:08) So how did the Fine Arts Commission find talent in the country? Well, they held a number of exhibitions. There were four; 1843, 44, 45 and 47. The wife of the secretary of the Fine Arts Commission, Lady Eastlake, made the following observation when she was attending the 1843 exhibition. She said between 20,000 – 30,000 people attended the exhibition each day over its two month duration. And the artist Charles West Cope who did paintings in the building here, one of the Victoria artists, went slightly further and said, "All England went to see it. All the omnibuses were covered with placards advertising it."
So it was keenly followed and it is clear that people from all walks of life went to the exhibitions, and it fitted in perfectly with the Victorian principal of using art for educational and indeed morally uplifting purposes.
What the Fine Arts Commission were doing was creating a scheme of decoration for a building that was on the one hand a Royal Palace and on the other hand the functioning Houses of Parliament. The approach they took in general terms was that they placed British political history within the wider context of British national history. They devised a scheme for the interiors by 1847, bearing in mind they were set up in 1941, so six years on they had a complete, if you like, blueprint for the art for the building.
What did that mean? What are were talking about in terms of numbers? Well they had planned over 140 paintings. These are large format paintings that part of the interior, and they had over 120 sculptures, large format statues. It was a mighty vision; it was a temple of art – that was the plan.
Slide 5
(11:22) The exterior of the building; this is the midpoint of the south elevation of the Victoria Tower, the entry point for the Queen at State Opening of Parliament into the Royal Palace. The art on the building, and indeed the art in the building, and the architecture of the building were meant to be part of a carefully conceived whole. This was the idea of the union of the arts; fine art, sculpture and architecture working together.
The statues on the outside of the building came under the control of the architect (the architect of course was Charles Barry, later Sir Charles Barry) and they were funded as part of the fabric of the building. If you count them there’s over 200 statues on the exterior of the building and they are Kings and Queens from the Saxon period onwards up until Queen Victoria. In fact in the middle of the slide here (you’ll have to take it from me) is the statue of Queen Victoria who appears on almost every elevation of the exterior of the building. This is very much a Royal Palace; it was designed as a Royal Palace.
Slide 6
(12:39) When we look at the inside; this is the House of Lords debating chamber, the most important interior within the new palace of Westminster, opened in 1847. I hope you can make out the 3 large format fresco paintings on the end wall. There are 18 metal statues around the window line of the interior, and it’s statues we are going to look at in a bit more detail.
The idea of the Fine Arts Commission, that "distinguished persons of the UK, to whose memories statues might with propriety be erected in or adjourning the Houses of Parliament" is what they talked about in that 4th report.
They provided a long list of 120 names, and this was the first real indicator of the commemorative function that they wanted statuary to perform in the building. As you might imagine, there were many Royal, Parliamentary and military figures in that long list, but there were also leading lights from literature and there were exponents of architecture.
They had Sir Christopher Wren, they had Inigo Jones, and amongst the artist they were looking for statues of William Hogarth and Sir Joshua Reynolds. I don't think there was ever any intention that all 120 would ever make it into the final line up of statues, but it was very clear that they wanted a variety of figures from a variety of disciplines in the country to be shown.
Slide 7
(14:28) By 1845 they had made a significant start. This is the main entry point into both the House of Lords and House of Commons. It’s called St Stephen’s Hall. It in its former life, prior to the fire of 1834, it was where the Royal Chapel, St Stephens Chapel, had been located. The Chapel had been the first permanent debating chamber for the House of Commons from the mid-1500s up until the fire of 1834.
The idea that the Fine Arts Commissioners had in here for the statues is this would be a line of major Parliamentary figures; Parliamentarians who had risen to importance, risen to eminence, in that period between the mid-1500s to the fire. So you’ve got some very key people. You've got the first Prime Minister Lord Walpole, you’ve got Lord Clarendon, Lord Somers and Pitt the Younger, Pitt the Elder and Charles James Fox.
The Commissioners picked the key sculptors of the Victorian period; people like William Calder Marshall, John Bell and John Henry Foley. These were people who had impressed the judges in the 1844 sculpture exhibition in Westminster Hall. Work began immediately and this was a scheme that ran really between 1851 (the first two that were completed of Hampden and Lord Falkland made it to the Great Exhibition where they were shown, and that then led to the other statues from the scheme being commissioned) and the whole lot were finished and in place by 1858. The Fine Arts Commission were moving ahead quickly in these early years of the work.
What the statues do is to give a real sense of what the Fine Arts Commissioners were hoping to achieve. They are monumental pieces on a heroic scale. This was done on purpose. They stand proud of the internal architecture and they punctuate the space either side of St Stephens’s Hall. You can’t walk thought the hall without noticing their presence and that was the idea, and they’re meant to echo the debates that happened in the debating chamber all those years ago.
Slide 8
(17:16) Now moving from the entry point of the Houses of Parliament over to the State Apartments in the House of Lords. This is the Prince’s chamber. It serves as the ante-room to the House of Lords debating chamber that we saw a few minutes ago, and its part of that grand suite of rooms through which the Monarch processes at State Opening of Parliament.
These were rooms designed for state ceremony. I’ve picked this one because it’s got the highest density of works of art planned for any interior within the Palace of Westminster. There are 52 individual works of art that were planned for this interior and indeed all 52 have been done. I make that point because it’s taken 160 years to get to that point and the final elements of the scheme were only finished in 2010. We will come to them in a moment, but the scheme has the statue group of Queen Victoria centrally placed and apart from that it’s got 3 schemes relating to Tudor history.
I am going to begin with the statue of Queen Victoria. Just to give you some idea of the involvement that Prince Albert had. The statue group were carved by John Gibson and just to show how it actually worked, when Gibson was down at Osborne house, making preparations, he had a session with Queen Victoria to model the face. Prince Albert entered the room and said that he was most anxious about the work that Gibson was going to be doing for the Parliament House. Then they fell into conversation and Albert commented,
"Now there is one thing to be lamented in this country. Our nobility are ignorant of the art of sculpture. In my country at the university when I learnt Greek I was taught principles of Greek art, for one illustrates the other. I have drawn the forms of beauty and proportion."
Turning his attention then on the clay model that Gibson was working on, this is Gibson talking now,
"The bust which I was working up from memory, Albert looked at, and he said to me ‘will you permit me?’. He then took the modelling tool and worked away changing many parts. He worked for 10 minutes at it."
Gibson then went on to complete the marble statue at his studio in Rome and it was then shipped over. It arrived via the Thames to the Palace of Westminster in the mid-1850s, where again Albert was closely involved in inspecting it and I have a number of quotes, I may pick one or two.
"His Royal Highness remarked the chin was much too full and large for the Queen and the drapery hanging from the arms was much admired, but it was remarked by Albert that the oval form it produces is much too alike under the arms. And in examining the crown the Prince observed that the usual form of the fleur-de-lis is much more graceful and more intelligible than the ornament you have used, and indeed His Royal Highness went on to sketch the form as he felt it should be."
I could go on; the idea was that these were notes taken by the Secretary of the Fine Arts Commission, passed on to Gibson so that Gibson when he came to London next time would be able to make amendments. Well, Gibson never came back to London while Albert was alive, so the House of Lords can enjoy the statue as originally intended by Albert.
The line of portraits just above the head line of Queen Victoria are figures taken from Tudor history. They were painted by students under the supervision of their professor, a man called Richard Burchett. Again Albert was involved; Albert decided on the order in which the individual Tutor portraits should be hung, and he gave a powerful steer to the whole Commission idea. A letter written from Eastlake to one of the artists noted the following:
"The Prince is desirous of reviving the accuracy and delicacy of execution of certain portraits of the Holbein kind."
Again, this was a complete scheme. By the mid 1850s, students working on two paintings each had completed the scheme. This is in advance of the setting up of the National Portrait Gallery, and one of the problems was identifying the source portraits that should be copied.
If we look at the high level paintings in the Prince’s Chamber, we come to the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Why is this showing here? Well obviously it is an outstandingly important part of Tudor history, but in the old House of Lords debating chamber, tapestries that had been commissioned in the 1590s, after the 1588 defeat of the Armada, hung there for about 200 years.
They were enormous; they were over 26 feet wide, they were 12 or 13 feet in height and they perished in the fire of 1834, but not before they had been recorded in engravings. Because they had risen to importance when debates went on in the House of Lords and when the nation was under threat, Peers could clutch at these tapestries saying, "This was the moment the nation was saved."
The intention was to include them within the new works of art commissioned for the new Victorian Palace. Only one was ever done and in fact the one that was done is the one in the photograph above the statue group of Queen Victoria. The other 5 were incomplete.
Slide 9
(23:52) In 2007, the very generous donation of money from the American benefactor Mark Pigott OBE enabled the remaining 5 to be painted, and over a 2 and a half year period the tapestries, which were then prints, were then converted into large format (they don’t look very large in the slide here but each one is about 12 feet tall by about 15 feet wide), so a fairly major piece of gap filling historically and completing the original scheme of the mid-1840s.
Slide 10
(24:37) I’ve got the detail of the final painting of the series. This is a series painted by the artist Anthony Oakshett, and he pulled together a team of very expert artists (4 artists working for him), and they were completed in a building owned by English Heritage near Bedford and then shipped up to London.
In the final painting of the series, this is the moment when Sir Francis Drake’s initiative to send fire ships in amongst the Spanish fleet works. You can see them in the middle of the painting. They’re the ones with what look like clouds hovering nearby to them and they’re being floated into the Spanish fleet. At that point the Spanish fleet is in the tight formation they’ve been able to hold as they float down the channel, which is then broken and that is, although nobody knows it at the time, the end of the threat posed by the Spanish Armada.
Slide 11
(25:38) I’ve got a further slide showing the paintings being painted at Wrest Park, the English Heritage property in Bedford and it gives an idea of the scale of the 5 paintings.
Going back to the 1860s, it had all been going very well, from the late 1840’s through the 1850’s, and it came to a very dramatic halt in December 1861. That was the date when Prince Albert died. Within a few years the Fine Arts Commission had disbanded and the artists who were working on paintings at that time found themselves working under very different circumstances.
The grand vision to cover the walls of this fine building came to a very premature end. Out of that 140 paintings that I mentioned earlier, 67 had been done, the bulk of them in the Prince’s Chamber. It left many of the walls empty and they were covered instead with the patterned wallpapers designed by Pugin. It was the end of that 20 year period of state patronage of the arts.
There was one unexpected benefit by not completing the schemes of the interior, and that was that generations who came later could commemorate people who they felt were important as part of the building.
Slide 12
(27:15) This is the statue of Gladstone, who of course served 4 terms as Prime Minister. When his body was given the honour of lying in state in Westminster Hall, people filing past it, it was decided that money should be found, donated, to make a large marble statue. This is carved by Pomeroy. The marble statue was placed in Central Lobby, the mid-point of the Palace of Westminster. There was a statue there already of John Bright, and John Bright had to be moved in an early example of political jockeying with the art collection in the building.
I’m going to leap from the Victorian period through to the 1950s. Why am I doing that? Well, I’m looking at periods of continued work on the development of the collection. That’s not to say that nothing was done in the period between 1860 and 1950; in fact there was quite a lot done.
Slide 13
(28:30) This is going back to the slide of St Stephens’s Hall, and the paintings that you see between each of the sculptures were part of a scheme which had come out of a Select Committee set up in 1907 to look at areas of the building where the art had remained unfinished from the Victorian period. The scheme of paintings in here were finished in 1928 and they went under the group title of “The building of Britain”, jumping through 800 years of national history.
Slide 14
(29:13) There were significant purchases that were made over this period. I’m going to pick one (I’ve got to be selective for time) and this is the House of Commons in session shortly after the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707. It’s the earliest painting of the interior, and the interior we’re looking at here is St Stephens’s Chapel. The medieval religious paintings have been covered over by wooden panelling supplied by Sir Christopher Wren and also a false ceiling had been put in to halve the enormous height of the medieval chapel. But it gives a unique view of the first united Parliament which met for the first time on 23rd October 1707 with 45 Scottish Members of Parliament joining their English counterparts.
At this point I am going to jump to the mid-1950s to July 1954, when a Committee was appointed by the Minister of Works after consultation with The Speaker to examine the works of art in the House of Commons, and to make recommendation about their display, their selection and indeed their acquisition. It was chaired by Viscount Hinchingbrooke and it took stock of the collection.
The Committee looked at the large format history paintings which we’ve been looking at; they looked at the statuary. They looked at some of the notable pieces that had been acquired, but otherwise they were generally critical of what they found hanging on the walls. This is taken from the Committee minutes.
"The House of Commons Art Collection contains few works of character and artistic merit. There is comparatively little to be gained by simply rearranging the collection and new works must be acquired. Improvements must follow a pre-conceived plan, and we suggest Parliamentary figures whose portraits should be secured and displayed."
I think the point was that a lot had happened in that 90 year period. History had overtaken the collection in Parliament and had moved on. The idea of relying on individual donations or loans, or adding to the collection in a piecemeal fashion, had failed to keep the collection up to date, and it lacked any real cohesion or focus.
The Committee pointed out that many Parliamentary figures worthy of a place on the collection were missing, and they compiled a list of nearly 200 eminent Parliamentarians going back into history whose portraits they thought would merit joining the collection. But they made the point that,
"It is too much to hope that the House could secure a portrait of everybody listed (this sounding a bit like what the Victorians were up to as well). We have however, indicated 78 people on that list whom we regard as being particularly important."
The Committee led to a burst of activity, and really an injection of energy in to the collection. On the one hand, it meant that a formal Committee, the Advisory Committee on Works of Art, was set up and it’s continued ever since. The focus has remained on Parliamentary history, and the acquisition policy has been developed and reviewed over decades, to ensure that the collection reflects the interest of Parliament.
So, what’s been achieved? That list of 78 people; it’s good to know that a over a 50 or 55 year period, just under 50 per cent, have been acquired for the House collection (37). And I’ve got some examples; I’ve picked out some high profile ones, to show you.
Slide 15
(33:10) On the left is William Cowper, 1st Earl Cowper, which was painted round about 1695. What’s his claim to fame? Well, he was a Commissioner for the Treaty of Union between England and Scotland, and he then served at the first Lord Chancellor of Britain, following the act of Union in 1707. It’s a portrait painted by Thomas Murray and it was generously donated through Lord Gavron to the House of Lords.
On the right, Sir Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, generally regarded as the first Prime Minister, and he dominated the politics of his generation. He’s shown wearing robes of Chancellor of Exchequer and the portrait’s painted in 1742 by Steven Slaughter, the final year of his premiership as Prime Minister. It used to be on loan to the House of Commons in the mid-1950s and the subsequently acquired, by the Works of Art Committee, in 1960.
Slide 16
(34:22) Moving on chronologically, we come to on the left, Edward Thurlow, Lord Thurlow, painted in 1784. He was Lord Chancellor for 14 years under four different Prime Ministers, between 1778 and 1792; he was a great political survivor. He presided over the longest trial in history, the impeachment of Warren Hastings, which ran between 1788 and 1792. William Wyndham MP, who was one of the prosecutors of the trial, was heard to say
"How well he acquits himself on these solemn occasions! With what dignity, what loftiness, what high propriety he comports himself."
This is a portrait by George Romney; it’s one of the key pictures as part of the House of Lords collection. Again it was loaned in the late 1950s, firstly to the House of Commons then moved to the House of Lords and finally allocated to the House of Lords in 1998 in lieu of inheritance tax.
On the right, we have William Wilberforce, painted in 1833, the final year of his life. Wilberforce was a foremost campaigner in the Parliament for the abolition of the slave trade and he died 3 days after the Abolition Bill was carried by the Government on 26th July 1833. This is an oil version painted by George Richmond, which was acquired by the Commons collection in 2003.
Slide 17
(36:22) Moving into the 20th century, we’ve got two key historical figures; they’re both Prime Ministers. On the left hand side we’ve got the portrait bust of James Ramsay Macdonald, sculpted in 1926. It’s a powerful character study of the first Labour Prime Minister. Ramsay Macdonald was Prime Minister in 1924 and then again in 1929 and 1931, so this is sculpted in between those first two periods of his premiership. He then became Prime Minister of the national Government between 1931 and 1935. It’s sculpted by Jacob Epstein and it was given to the House of Commons by the family of Ramsay Macdonald in 1988.
On the right hand side, a fine portrait of Neville Chamberlain, painted in the lead up to the General Election in 1929. The portrait was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1933, in which Chamberlain was described as that "mighty mover behind cabinet scenes, lean, taciturn, iron willed."
In 1931, he served as Chancellor in Ramsay Macdonald’s national Government that we’ve just heard of. He became Prime Minister in 1937; he of course is the one who declared “peace for our time”, after meeting Hitler in 1938. His policy of appeasement was then short lived, and on the 3rd September 1939, he declared war after Germany invaded Poland. The portrait is by William Orpen. It was bought by the House of Commons Committee with financial help from the Speaker’s Art Fund. Orpen is one of the most fashionable and financially one of the most successful portrait painters of the 20th century.
One of the obstacles in building up a collection at the House of Commons used to be the 10 year rule. What was the 10 year rule? Well, the 10 year rule meant that living sitters could not be represented in the collection until 10 years after they’d died. It had been introduced in 1925, by the First Commissioner of Works, in agreement with The Speaker and the Lord Great Chamberlain and it stipulated that
"no portrait of any living person or person deceased less than 10 years shall be accepted for exhibition with the precincts of the Houses of Parliament."
And the rule was designed to ensure time is allowed in which to judge an individual’s achievements in perspective before commemorating them within the House. The 10 year rule was a significant problem for building up a modern collection. It meant the House had to rely on portraits of Parliamentarians coming up on the art market or indeed being offered as donations 10 years after that person had died.
Slide 18
(39:37) In 1991 a solution came about in the shape of the 1 Parliament Street Building – shown here - painted by Julian Barrow. The building had been taken on to provide much needed office accommodation for Members of Parliament. As it was separate to the main building, the Works of Art Committee pushed for a different policy to apply, so that living images or images of living Parliamentarians could be displayed.
That was on the basis that 10 years after they had died, they could then be considered for moving to the main Parliament building. The proposal was agreed by The Speaker and it had immediate benefit. It was now possible to establish and build up a contemporary portrait collection, and it was the first time there had been an opportunity to commission portraits of living sitters.
Slide 19
(40:34) So this point we move on. On the left hand side we have the official portrait of Baroness Thatcher – those who have walked around the corridor, outside the Boothroyd room would have seen that picture.
The portrait was commissioned from the artist Henry Mee shortly after Lady Thatcher left office and completed in 1992. Lady Thatcher was the longest serving British Prime Minster of the 20th century. She was the first woman to hold the office of the Prime Minister. When the painting went on view for the first time, an interviewer talking to Lady Thatcher suggested the portrait looked rather severe, to which she replied,
"When you have been Prime Minister for 11 years, you’re no push over."
On the right, the portrait of Tony Blair by the artist Phil Hale, painted in 2007. Tony Blair became the Labour party’s longest serving Prime minister, he led Labour to 3 consecutive General Election victories and he stepped down as Prime Minister on the 27th June 2007.
This is the only formal painting of Mr Blair to be painted while he was in office, and sittings were given in the final months of his tenure of office in 2007. The chairman of the Works of Art Committee in the Commons at the time, Hugo Swire, commented as follows when it went on public view;
"It’s a virtuoso piece of painting. I believe it’s one of the most important additions we have made to our collection of contemporary portraits at the Commons in recent years."
The policy that applies to portrait commissions is that Parliamentarians are approached while they are in office, so as to maximise the relevance and value of those portraits to the Parliament Art Collection. We take great care to match the artist to the sitter and to go on to nurture that relationship to ensure that the portraits go beyond mere likenesses to show the character of the man or woman. And I hope this gives some example also of the variety of styles and approaches that we try and achieve over a well-balanced, contemporary collection.
Slide 20
(43:10) Moving on, Dr Ian Paisley on the left, Margaret Beckett on the right. With the portrait of Margaret Beckett, she has had a long and distinguished Parliamentary career. She served, first of all, in Harry Wilson’s government, and under James Callaghan she became Parliamentary Under-secretary of State at the Department of Education and Science. After the death of John Smith, she was chosen to be Leader of the Labour party, the first woman to do so.
In 2006, she was appointed British Foreign Secretary, again the first woman to hold the position, and after Margret Thatcher the second woman to hold one of the great offices of state. We’re also proud to announce with the portrait, it’s by Antony Williams and it won the Ondaatje Prize earlier this year, at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters.
Slide 21
(44:17) In the House of Lords, we are similarly active in building up a contemporary collection of key Parliamentary figures. On the left - Baroness Amos, on the right - Baroness Hayman. Lady Amos, first of all; the decision had been taken by the Committee to commission the portrait of Lady Amos in 2003, shortly after she became Secretary of State for International Development. She was the first black woman cabinet minister in Britain. Later that year, she went on to become Leader of the House of Lords and the portrait painted by Paul Benney was completed and unveiled in 2005.
Lady Hayman on the right hand side of the screen, was the first elected Speaker of the House of Lords in 2006. Before that, the role of Speaker of the Lords was a part of the Lord Chancellor’s responsibilities. The Lord Speaker presides over the proceedings in the Chamber as well as representing the House on ceremonial occasions. Viscount Falkland, the Chairman of the Lords Works of Art committee in 2007, noted “The portrait marks the transition on the woolsack from Lord Chancellor to Lord Speaker.”
Slide 22
(45:36) Moving then finally to the final slide I’ve got. One of the other significant developments post the early 1990s was instead of looking in on the work of Parliament and notable Parliamentarians, Parliament wants to look outwards at the whole of the UK and to the geographical areas represented by Parliament. Themes for building up a collection (themes such as areas of geographical interest, cultural diversity, flora and fauna, and the industrial heritage) were proposed.
The opportunity was taken to target artists who were working around the UK and allow their work to be showcased within the collection of both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Efforts were made to achieve a balance between the different geographical areas of the country.
You’ll have realised that the two items on the slide are the two tapestries hanging in this room. They are entitled ‘Parliament 1 and Parliament 2’. They were designed by Philip Sanderson and woven by Sanderson, Armstrong-King and Bloor at West Dean College (2000-2001). The composition is made up of layered images which take ‘the motifs of maps and landscape to represent the influence of Parliament on the landscape and the population of the country.’ You can see on the one behind the screen here references to tithe maps.
Philip notes them as being,
"...important historical documents as they reveal the original demarcation lines of fields, thus providing an accurate record of a developing landscape."
The idea came to Philip Sanderson when he was standing in the room here back in 1999, at which point the floor and ceiling had been put in but there were no walls, and you could see through to Big Ben and the Parliament building beyond. He wanted the designs to be images of open space. He said,
"The identity of England is widely seen to be rooted in images of landscape, whether it be in the paintings of Constable or the poetry o William Blake and Rupert Brooke."
And if you’re wondering why they are lots of shades of blue in colour, the intention was that blue would evoke space and distance. And on that note, having come full circle back to Portcullis, I am going to finish the lecture.
Thank you.
END
Image: Parliamentary copyright