UK PM Removes Raleigh Portrait from 10 Downing Street!

[SmokeyJock]

Personally I'm more concerned with yet another looming round of real terms cuts to public services hitting the most vulnerable in our society than how the pillock in charge decides to decorate his office - because it just seems to be some kind of vacuous PR signalling given he keeps being accused of running a "boy's club". It literally doesn't matter what's hanging on his wall.

I also don't take the view that history has ever been an objective edifice written in stone that can't be reinterpreted by each generation of society, because that would be silly.

But then perhaps this thread is a little bit political for the forum rules, no?

 

[Pipke]

From what I see, Great Britain is changing into another country - i.e. one different in nearly every way from what it was. Taking down historical paintings was just a part of changing world views and attitudes.

 

[Richmond B. Funkenhouser]

What's going on these days isn't about changing the words that have been written down about history. That's bad enough on it's own right, people teaching opinions on what has happened as if they are facts.

This is about changing the facts of what happened in the past. Selling a new history, a fake one... A lie.

 

[SmokeyJock]

What's going on these days isn't about changing the words that have been written down about history. That's bad enough on it's on right, people teaching opinions on what has happened as if they are facts.

This is about changing the facts of what happened in the past. Selling a new history, a fake one... A lie.

Are we still talking about a painting being replaced?

 

[BingBong]

Agree about the article, but I was hoping for reasoned insight from our fellow members.

Raleigh started that awful tobacco craze and smoked in pubs! Off message, had to go. But Liz the First getting the elbow is a bit odd, if empowered females were criteria.

 

[Richmond B. Funkenhouser]

Are we still talking about a painting being replaced?

Yep.

 

[warren]

I thought the PM and his wife were allowed to have art that pleased them. Like the US president and his wife. Which US President sent the Churchill portrait back to the English? Very gauche! He could have just quietly removed it, put it into storage.

 

[MisterBadger]

And what the duece are the paintings upper L and R?

No idea, but if I had to choose two paintings to get rid of from No. 10 Downing Street, those would be the ones.

 

[georged]

Aw, woke garbage. Removed historic imagery to replace it with female empowerment art.

Starmer REMOVES portraits of Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Raleigh after having also ditched Thatcher picture

The new artwork hung up in their place could be seen when Volodymyr Zelensky visited Downing Street last week

www.gbnews.com

Exactly so.

It's just "virtue signaling" writ large.

 

[marconi]

Taking down Margaret Thatcher I can understand. What will he replace that with? Samantha Fox?

I thought the PM and his wife were allowed to have art that pleased them. Like the US president and his wife. Which US President sent the Churchill portrait back to the English? Very gauche! He could have just quietly removed it, put it into storage.

As 10 Downing Street is the Prime Ministers Gaff for the next five years he is entitled to move the furniture around and hang whatever paintings appeal to him,just like every other Prime Minister.The only reason that this has become a story is because he is a Labour Prime Minister.The Tory press which is every newspaper in the UK have decided to run with this.

 

[condorlover1]

Damn and I was hoping for that life sized painting of Sir Oswald Mosley!

 

[Kobold]

I thought the PM and his wife were allowed to have art that pleased them. Like the US president and his wife. Which US President sent the Churchill portrait back to the English? Very gauche! He could have just quietly removed it, put it into storage.

Supposedly that’s false but I wouldn’t put it past him to do such a thing.

 

[jackattack]

Virtue-signalers and the people on the internet they outrage...tonight at 11.

 

[trudger]

And what the duece are the paintings upper L and R?

Quoted from The Telegraph:

Both have now been replaced with scenes from Crivelli’s Garden, a mural by Dame Paula Rego, the late Portuguese-born artist, whose work focuses on “strong and courageous women”. Quoted from The Telegraph

 

[smudgersmissingleg]

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

― George Orwell, 1984

 

[kcghost]

I continue to be amazed at people for looking at old pictures and those in them with 21st Century values.

 

[paulfg]

Agree about the article, but I was hoping for reasoned insight from our fellow members.

you had reasoned insight from smudger

 

[smudgersmissingleg]

I thought the PM and his wife were allowed to have art that pleased them. Like the US president and his wife. Which US President sent the Churchill portrait back to the English? Very gauche! He could have just quietly removed it, put it into storage.

I'm pretty sure I remember reading that Obama removed it and Trump put it back when he became President. I could be wrong though.

 

[smudgersmissingleg]

The first female British Chancellor has done a similar thing. She's ordered the removal of all pictures of men in the 11 Downing Street state room in favour of artworks of or by women. Look, I understand that she wants different artwork and she's perfectly entitled to do so but it just seems a bit ott to me.

Rachel Reeves orders removal of all pictures of men in state room

The Chancellor announced that every painting in the room would be replaced by artworks of or by women in order to celebrate 'amazing women who have gone before us'.

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[UB 40]

Looks much better now in number 10. Seriously, those were pretty gruesome portraits, relics of the English colonial era. The paint is off. I don't think there's anything wrong with Paula Rego as a representative of contemporary art. All the better that her art shows the suffering of oppression but also the strength of women. There are currently cultures in which the disenfranchisement of women is being promoted. Standing up for women's rights has nothing to do with a woke attitude to life.