Imagine trying to export the Tudors without the help of Hilary Mantel. After her untimely death in the autumn, the Cleveland Museum of Art has managed, with assistance from the Met in New York, where The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England began its US tour. The person they needed more desperately was Queen Elizabeth II, its most significant lender, but the exhibition opened two years late because of Covid-19, and after she had died.
The curators have scoured the world for evidence of the Tudors’ cultural legacy and found most of it very close to its original home, in England and Wales. There doesn’t seem to have been much demand for it elsewhere, except in the United States.
