An illustrious forebear

Last week, I paid a lunchtime visit to one of the many jewels in Newcastle’s cultural crown, the Laing Art Gallery, which is currently hosting the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2008, on tour from the National Portrait Gallery.

As an adjunct to the photographic exhibition, the gallery had devoted a room to a parallel display of painted portraits from its own collection. Among these was the striking image of the old lady pictured here, holding the eye with her piercing and watchful gaze.

Imagine my delight when, on closer inspection, she turned out to be none other than Judy Dowling, ‘Keeper of the Town Hutch’, painted by Henry Perlee Parker in or around 1820. Who?, I hear you ask; keeper of the what? I’ll quote from the gallery’s explanatory notice:

“This portrait shows Judy Dowling, a well-known figure in 19th-century Newcastle. She was the Keeper of the Town ‘Hutch’, a chest where the records and archives for Newcastle had been stored since medieval times. … Judy can also be seen in Parker’s picture ‘Eccentric and Well Known Characters in Newcastle (private collection), which was widely known through prints.”

So not only was this grande dame a distant professional ancestor, and gatekeeper to our city’s trusted pre-digital repository; she also had a public profile that her modern equivalents would happily sell their souls for ...

The picture shown here is made available through the Tyne and Wear Museums website, and can be found in that context through the link below, along with other works from the collections.

http://tinyurl.com/obsatq