Over the past eight months, Dutch photographer Tessa Posthuma de Boer has worked intensively on a series of portraits of Henry VIII, his six wives, Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell. She began in response to the ‘Cromwell Trilogy’ by Hilary Mantel, of which the final volume, The Mirror and the Light, was published this spring.
Are you looking at a photograph or a painting? With her photographic collages Tessa Posthuma de Boer creates a bridge, as it were, to the past – ‘they seem ready to move and speak’ – just as Hilary Mantel creates a bridge to the present by writing about a sixteenth-century period in the present tense.
This work represents Anne of Cleves (Anna von Kleve), (born September 22, 1515—died July 16, 1557, London, England), fourth wife of King Henry VIII of England. Henry married Anne because he believed that he needed to form a political alliance with her brother, William, duke of Cleves, who was a leader of the Protestants of western Germany.
