Kate Middleton Lands New Job, Puts Art History Degree to Work

We’re talking about Kate Middleton, ladies and gentlemen, and she is about to make her worldwide debut as none other than a museum curator at London’s prestigious National Portrait Gallery no less!

On March 1, the Duchess will put her University of St. Andrews art history BA to good use and for all to see with the opening of NPG’s latest exhibition Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography for which she has selected the images on view.

The show will feature work by Julia Margaret Cameron, Oscar Rejlander, Clementina Hawarden, and Lewis Carroll, four well-known early British photographers.

In a welcome twist, Middleton actually wrote her undergraduate thesis on the photography of Lewis Carroll, titled ‘Angels From Heaven: Lewis Carroll’s Photographic Interpretation of Childhood.’ Fittingly, a number of child portraits will be showcased in the exhibition, both by Carroll and the other photographers, including images of Alice Liddell, who of course was the muse for the author’s most iconic piece of fiction.

Many people probably don’t realise that Carroll of Alice in Wonderland fame was also an artist in the field of photography. Middleton hoped to shed a light on that in her thesis and will continue with that mission through her curation of this exhibition.
As is customary for a curator, Middleton herself has written the exhibition’s catalogue. She explains: ‘Children held a special place in the Victorian imagination and were celebrated for their seemingly boundless potential. This notion still rings true for us today and it underpins much of my official work and the charities I have chosen to support, and, indeed, my role as a young mother.’

It is inspiriting to see Charlotte and George’s mum continuing to add to British cultural legacy through this exciting artistic endeavour. She is also a photographer herself as well as a patron of the NPG, so perhaps this will just be the first of many collaborations to come.