What makes a celebrated beauty, and who sets the standards by which it is judged? In 17th-century Restoration London, the answer was clear.
In the 1660s, Sir Peter Lely, court painter to Charles II, painted a series of portraits of 10 prominent society women, led by Barbara Villiers, 1st Duchess of Cleveland, the king’s principal mistress. Over time the collection came to be known as the “Windsor Beauties” and held as the archetype of feminine loveliness of the time.
Now part of the royal collection they hang at Hampton Court Palace as part of an exhibition that interrogates those questions in relation to the Britain of today.
Conceived by the art historian and musician David McAlmont and featuring work by the artist and portrait photographer Robert Taylor and the film-maker Mark Thomas, Permissible Beauty juxtaposes Lely’s works with portraits of six contemporary black queer sitters. Its aim, they say, is to draw parallels between the artifice and performance of the Restoration and today, and to challenge visitors, perhaps, to examine their own sense of what makes a contemporary beauty.
The contrast between the historical and contemporary portraits is not as abrupt as it might first appear, says Matthew Storey, collections curator for Historic Royal Palaces. The Restoration court was an arena in which dress was highly performative, just as it often is in black queer subcultures, he says.
“An important part of the culture of the court was masques, in which members of the court dressed up and people read meaning into who was taking on certain roles. The idea of dressing up and performance and that having meaning is an incredibly important part of that culture.”
The exhibition also explores hints of rarely told queer stories among Lely’s original sitters, two of whom – Villers and Frances Stewart, Duchess of Richmond – were reported by Samuel Pepys to have taken part in a mock marriage ceremony as a “frolic”. Lely’s portrait of Stewart, in which she is dressed as a chaste Diana, is flanked by another painting in which she is wearing male clothes – highly unusual for the time, says Storey.
“So often, with queer history, it has been erased – you get examples of literal erasure where pages are cut out of diaries, for instance. And here we have just a hint, a piece of evidence of a culture which may have been lost.”
The distinctive “Lely look” shared by the Restoration portrait series underlines the conformity of ideas of beauty of the time – and also has contemporary resonances, says McAlmont. “If you’re looking at them for the first time, you see several people with very similar eyebrows, very similar eyelids full mouths, the undress. It’s the Lely filter. If it was Instagram, you press the Lely button, and get that look.”
The contemporary sitters – who include Ebony Rose Dark, Son of a Tutu and Le Gateau Chocolat – were closely involved in their presentation, in a collaboration that in total took three years, says Taylor. They are shown both without artifice, in simple black and white photographs, and in an exuberant film that explores the process of makeup and costume in creating performative identities.
“The Windsor Beauties represent a set of 17th-century values about beauty and value of people – I was interested that although those are 17th-century values, quite a lot of them persist to the present in a Britain that now looks very different,” says Taylor.
“I was interested in why and how those things have survived, and what could be done, through portraiture, to bring a different sensibility in how we’re looking at and listening to people.”
While his intention is to broaden notions of beauty, Taylor says, “this is not a campaign, it’s a celebration”.
• Permissible Beauty is at Hampton Court palace in south-west London until 26 February
