#52: Gallery label: 'The Promise'

' The Promise’ by Henry Scott Tuke

This painting is called ‘The Promise’. Take a look at it (there's a better image here). What might the boy and girl be thinking? Who is foregrounded? The blossom takes up over half of the picture. What effect does this have? What might ‘the promise’ be?

These are the type of questions I would sometimes ask an audience as a museum educator to get ‘inside’ gallery pictures and bring them alive a little. So I was very disappointed by the accompanying label:

Evidence suggests that Henry Scott Tuke would today identify as a gay man. By talking about Tuke’s sexuality within the gallery, we are deliberately acknowledging his importance to an established history of queer culture. By recognising this history, it makes us more aware of it and less ignorant to its meaning. It is with this awareness that the artwork then become something more significant and a recognisable queerness emerges.

 Histories of minorities need to be explicitly recognised. The problem is, as ceramicist Matt Smith said when I interviewed him for my book Curiosities from the Cabinet, ‘museums deal with objects and there aren’t that many that are intrinsically gay’. So interpretation has to fill in. This gallery has bravely tried to do this. 

Are brushstrokes sexual?

Nevertheless, I have some reservations about its style (the grammar needs improving) and the content: Even if Tuke was gay, did that inform his every brushstroke? He in fact painted many pictures of naked boys (see his Wikipedia entry for examples), but I can’t help feeling this label would fare even less well next to one of those, since it would explicitly ask us to look at the picture sexually and would diminish it. (According to the Wikipedia entry, his paintings of nude youths are never explicitly sexual).

The label gave me a similar uneasy feeling to seeing a portrait of poet Gerald Manley Hopkins in a Queer Icons exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery exhibition in 2009; there is no evidence that Hopkins might have wanted his supposed sexuality broadcast, or that it explicitly influenced most of his work.

More broadly, I think such an approach risks pigeonholing artists as gay, female, disabled, white, black or whatever, undermining art’s universality and ability to communicate with all. Labelling people in this way amounts to making ‘identity-fragments’, according to blogger Maria Popova, which undermine our wholeness. 

So how would I rewrite the label?

I think by using questions, to invite the reader to look more deeply, which I regard as one of a museum label’s two main functions (along with providing information):

‘The Promise’ captures a moment in time which is both intense and fleeting. What are the two youths thinking? What might the promise be? Tuke worked in the Impressionist style, and lived in Newlyn, Cornwall, with a colony of artists.

 If I wanted to mention Tuke’s supposed sexuality, I would clarify that this is part of the museum’s interpretation, for example: ‘the museum has chosen to place Tuke in its “queer history” group of painters’.

Another label in the same gallery is much more successful in my view in pointing out the artist’s role in activism.The second paragraph reads: 'The artist believed in equal opportunities for women in art. She was a founder of the Manchester Society of Women Painters and in 1922 became the first female associate of the Royal Academy since the 18th century.' I like the way description of Annie Swynnerton’s activism is in a separate paragraph and the first paragraph focuses on the painting itself:

An image of the painting is here.

I wonder if readers have other examples of ways in which museums (successfully or unsuccessfully) integrate an artist or writer’s sexuality into their interpretation?