It’s always unwise to assume today’s history is better than yesterday’s. Interpretations change, and the current vogue for seeing Richard III, so long portrayed as a tyrant, as a nice guy who somehow lost track of his nephews’ whereabouts, just as he was having himself crowned in young Edward V’s place, may one day seem silly. I am prepared to bet that it will.
The Wallace Collection in London is the last place I expected to encounter what amounts to a kind of historical populism. The same age that witnessed Brexit also saw the rehabilitation of Richard III after his skeleton was discovered under a Leicester car park in 2012. This has inspired an apparently universal assumption that Richard was a Good King, even though his skeleton provides no evidence about his deeds in life. That’s what this exhibition, a tie-in with the new Steve Coogan film The Lost King, also seems to take for granted. Thus it places a big sceptical question mark over the painting at its heart, while presenting prop armour used in the film as the last word in factual reconstruction.
