What a wonderful, captivating and enriching walking tour of the National Portrait Gallery in London, UK!
Professor Lear was wonderful – he epitomises the quintessential New Yorker, right down to the accent, deportment, vocabulary and whit … and all this is applied with lavish generosity and personal engagement through this tour.
We were a group of approximately 10 people in the tour I attended on 04/09/2016, mostly gay men. It was a very reasonable price considering the attention, detail and obvious preparation – and was definitely excellent value for money. The Portrait Gallery bustled around us as we ferried ourselves from exhibit to exhibit, occasionally people would catch phrases of our tour and their ears would spike up … or we would coalesce around someone viewing a piece and they would temporarily become part of our enthusiastic group (which I am sure made them envious of our inside information). We started by explaining the broad definition and scope of the tour – particularly explaining that ‘gay’ in the context of this tour included anything same-sex oriented. This comes into play in particular when considering historical figures, when ‘gay’ as we know now wasn’t similarly defined – but nonetheless existed.
Professor Lear took us from Shakespeare to King James IV, Queen Anne and other figures … we breezed through areas of the gallery which it wasn’t intrinsically gay (which we decided was a very broad definition for the purpose of this tour). But in understanding views of non-gay figures, particularly focusing on the sympathetic people like Churchill (with his famous phrase ‘It makes you proud to be British’ regarding an anecdote of Winston Churchill’s reaction upon hearing that a (male) member of Parliament had been found with a guardsman on a very cold February night).
The BIGGEST advantage of this tour wasn’t the bare facts, or the wonderful, convenient way these details were all compiled perfectly and insightfully. The best advantage was the context … being able to understand what was going on at the time of the events being pointed out. Professor Lear was comprehensively informed about all aspects of the people being focused on (for example, explaining the fact that Shakespeare’s likeness wasn’t absolutely irrefutable, and how we came to believe that the famous portrait is a probable likeness of him – which is a story in itself; or the in-depth intrigue surrounding the scandal of Chevalier d’Eon- which is sure to raise eyebrows. Literally – the story is so intercine and surreal that you will NEED Professor Lear to explain it to you in context!)
Of course Oscar Wilde was a centre piece of the tour, and we focused on him quite interestingly, with details I wasn’t aware of (and like any gay man, I’ve looked at him and his work). We also looked at E. M. Forster. Who wrote Maurice and Virginia Wolfe as well as the Bloomsbury Set. Perhaps my favourite was finishing on Joe Orton …
The tour was a wonderful insight, and involved everyone in a participatory manner, and diverted when anyone had particular interests or questions. The easy-pace through the gallery allowed everyone to keep up and engage with the professor directly. Professor Lear has an engaging and delightful manner which it’s easy to imagine being on his inner circle at a cocktail party. His knowledge and ability to draw together facts in a scintillating way are absolutely undeniable.
I thoroughly recommend this tour – and heartily plead with Professor Lear to extend this to other London venues around Soho and the city. Considering our swathe of gay history, walking tours and other museums and galleries are calling out for his services!!!
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