Talk: Art for Tudor Queens

How was art used to shape the identities and reputations of Tudor royal women? In this talk we’ll look at the portraits and belongings of five royal women across the Tudor century: Henry VII’s formidable mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort; Katherine of Aragon and Catherine Parr, Henry VIII’s first and last wives; Mary I, and Elizabeth I. At a time when women were seen as physically and intellectually inferior to men, how did these women shape their images and surroundings, and how were they shaped by the images others chose for them?

Dr Christina Faraday, FSA FRHistS, is a historian of art and ideas at the University of Cambridge. She specialises in the art and culture of Tudor England, and is the author of The Story of Tudor Art (2025), the first book to look at art across the whole sixteenth century in England, and of Tudor Liveliness: Vivid Art in Post Reformation England (2023), which considers the problem of realism in the period's strange and distinctive visual culture.