Close Encounters

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Martha Kearney hosts British celebrities past and present at the National Portrait Gallery

Martha Kearney invites ten leading figures of today to the newly refurbished National Portrait Gallery to champion a favourite picture from the Gallery's star-studded collection.

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Close Encounters: Alexa Chung and George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham

Sir Paul Smith & Cecil Beaton

Alexa Chung and George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham

BBC Radio 4 - Close Encounters, Alexa Chung and George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham

The model and writer Alexa Chung joins Martha Kearney at the National Portrait Gallery to celebrate a painting of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham.

In the penultimate episode of Martha Kearney's series marking the re-opening of the National Portrait Gallery in London her guest is the model, writer and presenter Alexa Chung.  Alexa took the opportunity of looking around the gallery as it prepared to re-open and made a shortlist of three pictures. The first was of Emma Hamilton depicted as an alluring young woman by the artist George Romney, who was clearly besotted with her, as was Admiral Lord Nelson who's portrait hangs next to Emma's in the gallery.  
She was also drawn to an earlier portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of King Charles I, not least because of the luxuriant and beautifully painted green silk dress she's wearing. The gallery curator Rab MacGibbon is on hand to point out that it was often the case that details in portraits, the landscape or clothes or flowers, would be the work of different hands, while the main artist would concentrate on the face and perhaps the hands.  
However Alexa finally plumps for a huge canvas painted in 1616, the earliest portrait of the series.  It's of the favourite, and very probably the lover of King James I, George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham.  It shows him at the height of his powers, wearing the order of the garter regalia.  As well as the extraordinarily vivid colour and drama of his costume, Alexa is drawn, as she was with Emma Hamilton, to the image of a man blessed with little more than good looks and a quick wit. Armed with  these Emma and George before her made the best of what they had, and while they may not have been popular figures with the establishments of their respective times, they made a statement, and its a statement that survives in the gallery.

Producer:  Tom Alban

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