Greenwich's Painted Hall tour is a unique adventure

Lovers of the English language bristle at casual abuse of the word “unique”. An adjective that should be used to describe the exceptionally rare and precious now seems to find its way into marketing copy for everything from laundry detergent to your corner restaurant. “Once in a lifetime” follows not that far behind in casual misuse.

Right now, and for just a few weeks longer, you can have an experience in Greenwich that … quite literally … gives you full rights to use that language. All you need to do is lay out £10, don a high visibility vest and follow your guide up four flights of scaffolding to get within inches of one of England’s greatest works of art.

The painted hall within the Old Royal Naval College is a kind of Georgian Sistine Chapel. Like its Italian cousin, this is one monumental room, painted wall and ceiling by the same artist for demanding patrons with very particular political messages in mind. Michelangelo’s mission was to glorify god. James Thornhill’s to glorify the Hanoverian dynasty, and the Glorious Revolution that preceded them to keep the throne Protestant. With his swirling clouds, cavorting deities, architectural elements and haughty aristocrats, Thornhill is as grandly bombastic as any Italian. In fact, in an era where it was still common to import Italians to paint palatial decorative schemes (witness Antonio Verrio’s Heaven and Hell rooms at Burghley House), Thornhill proved the English could do it for themselves.

The painted hall has always been a major tourist attraction, of course, but you’ve never been able to get this close. (Even if you've never been there, there's a good chance you've seen it on screen as this is a favourite filming location for historical drama.)

Roughly once every 100 to 125 years, the ceiling needs to be cleaned. Now, for only the third time in its history, scaffolding fills the hall so restorers can get at the paintings. And, much like the Sistine Chapel renovation that finished in 1999, Thornhill’s modern restorers are stripping off layers of varnish applied in well-meaning, but ultimately damaging, earlier efforts to reveal the luminous glory of the original colours.

Tours allow you to see the restorers at work and are escorted by a guide who explains both the process of cleaning and what’s going on in the vast series of paintings. One of the most moving sights of the visit is a jar full of discarded, oversized cotton buds that have been used to gently swab the ceiling. They've picked up so much dirt, they look like pieces of charcoal. It's also interesting to see how little fine detail is filled in on the figures. When you're standing far below, the almost-impressionistic flow of colours melds into realistic detail. This close, it's important to have the guide with you to explain what's going on. There's William and Mary, ascending to heaven in a blaze of glory. Above them, Apollo in his sun chariot leads the way. Gods and legends populate the clouds around them. They might have saved Great Britain for the Protestant faith but, ironically, it's a pagan pantheon that sweeps them to heaven.

Prows of massive ships occupy either end of the ceiling, showing off Britain's naval might. The men dining in the hall below, after all, would have been retired Royal Navy seamen. There's even a sprinkling of significant historic figures, and one Naval pensioner painted in to give his colleagues below a sense that everyone was included in this triumph. 

Beyond the Painted Hall, a stroll around Greenwich is always a delight. Just across the grand courtyard from the Hall is the Seamen's Chapel, a miracle of tromp l'oeil painting with a blue-and-white Wedgwood-inspired ceiling. It's one of James "Athenian" Stuart's masterpieces. 

The two magnificent ranges of Georgian architecture that these rooms sit in, facing each other through grand, columned arcades, are arms leading up to the Queen's House. Actually about a century older, this small palace was one of the first Palladian buildings in England. Though started for Anne of Denmark, it's most associated with Queen Henrietta Maria, a woman whose artistic taste was almost as good as her political instincts were bad. (She certainly contributed to the mess that led her husband, Charles I, to execution.) There's little of the original furnishing or decoration inside; the architecture itself, an exquisite circular staircase with sinuous wrought iron foliage and one exuberant Renaissance-style painted ceiling are all Henrietta Maria would recognise.

It's still worth a wander through, however, because the National Maritime Museum has moved some of its best paintings here, and other national collections have lent nautical masterpieces. The freshly-restored Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I is probably the grandest example. The main hall, which long ago lost its original decoration, has been given over to a modern art installation by Richard Wright. Now thousands of 23-carat gold leaf moths flutter over the ceiling and upper walls. It's a bit jarring against the Palladian architecture, but it is beautiful.

Best of all, the Queen's House is now free. Before the renovation, it was under English Heritage's management and had an admission fee. Now it's simply an extension of the excellent, admission-free museum next door.

This is all just the tip of the tourism iceberg in Greenwich. There's the Cutty Sark Museum (another newly-restored attraction), a particularly good artisans' street market, lots of high-end food trucks, the Greenwich Mean Time line, a gorgeous park and the ability to walk under the Thames through a marvel of Victorian engineering. Well worth a day out. 

But if you want a unique, up-close look at the Painted Hall ceiling, you need to get there before the end of September. It's a once-in-a-lifetime chance. Unless you plan to live for at least another century.

Maritime Museum does welcome resurrection of remarkable woman's reputation

There are few eras of British history before our modern one that have as many fascinating women as the late 18th and early 19th century.

Of course there's my heroine, Jane Austen, but she's just one of a flock of impressive writers including Ann Radcliffe and Fanny Burney. Mary Wollstonecraft struck some remarkable blows for early feminism, while her daughter Mary Shelley shook up the world with Frankenstein. Angelica Kauffman and Elisabeth Vigee le Brun were remarkable painters, while silversmith Hester Bateman created some of the forms we think of as classically Georgian. Sarah Siddons was establishing what we now know as modern stage acting, while Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace was making contributions to higher mathematics that would lead to modern computing. Georgiana Spencer was a notable, and fascinating, figure on the national political stage. I could go on.

Inevitably, most of these women have taken a shadowy place behind the men of the era. Of few is this more true than Emma Hamilton, now known by most ... if she is known at all ... as the mistress of Lord Nelson. But Emma was so much more than that. A fascinating show at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich is currently trying to set the record straight.

A woman with a remarkable aptitude for learning, she was an actress, model, singer, classicist, diplomat and arbiter of fashion. She used her skills to triumph through a series of circumstances that would have destroyed most women. She left home and was making her own way as a servant from the age of 12. She probably had to survive a stint as a prostitute (the usual end for young girls seeking their fortune in London, with up to 50,000 women working in the city's sex trade at the time) before she managed to ascend to the ranks of kept mistress to a nobleman. He dropped her when she became pregnant. She found another "protector" from amongst his friends. It might have been a similar story to many other girls used and tossed away, had it not been for Emma's thirst for knowledge. With every step she drank in lessons, from etiquette and accent to literature and current events. This is, undoubtably, one of the things that made her so fascinating to the portraitist George Romney, who painted her more than 70 times.

One of the triumphs of the show is a whole room of these Romney portraits. Romney said one of the reasons he kept returning to her as a model was her ability to inhabit a part, while society ladies all shared the same placid, expressionless gaze. Here you see her as a demure matron, a joyous young girl, a penitent Magdalen, a sensuous bacchanate; clearly all the same woman, but inhabiting radically different roles. It's easy to imagine what an astonishing actress, and how charismatic, she must have been.

Another horrific tragedy befell her when her second patron, Charles Greville, wanted to get rid of her in order to marry an heiress. Rather than settling an amount of money on her (the usual way of breaking up such relationships at the time), he shipped her to his uncle in Naples, telling her it was a vacation that he'd soon join her on, while informing his uncle that he was sending him a new mistress for his enjoyment. The show does a fine job using contemporary documents to dig into the tension of this situation. The handbook Charles gave her on being a good wife, annotated and clearly studied by Emma in an attempt to be all he had wanted ... despite the lack of legal status ... exposes the depths of his villainy. Her letters back to him, showing a slow realisation that he'd ended the relationship without the courage to do it face-to-face, are heartbreaking. There's no question she adored him.

Emma combined luck and fortitude to transform crisis into survival. Greville's uncle was the British ambassador to Naples, who was also a well known antiquarian and a "must see" stop on the grand tour. He was fascinated as much by Emma's mind as by her beauty, and set out to transform her, My Fair Lady style. In this part of the exhibit, paintings, books and artefacts bring the remarkable world of turn-of-the-19th-century Naples to life. Pompeii was giving up its treasures, there was a glittering royal court, every artist and intellectual came through town and Vesuvius smouldered over it all.

The place, and Hamilton's tutelage, inspired Emma to create The Attitudes ... a highly intellectual mime show in which she would transform, with the aid of just a few props and a shawl, into a series of historical and literary women from the ancient world. Visitors loved the challenge of figuring out who was who, showing off their impressive classical educations as they did so. I'd read much about The Attitudes, but the exhibit's decision to bring them to life by creating a small theatre and presenting a film of an Emma look-alike performing some of them was a master stroke. When she wasn't performing, she was studying classical pottery or hiking up Vesuvius for early lessons in vulcanology with Hamilton, or working with a singing coach. Her voice was good enough that the Madrid opera tried to hire her, and Haydn wrote a cantata within his Nelson mass for her to sing. At this point, the naval hero was no more than a respected friend.

Hamilton then shocked society by marrying her. But Emma was so famous by this point ... evidenced by a set of fine china on display with her Attitudes as the painted decoration ... she could ride out the negative comments. Here starts the summit of Emma's career. Now Lady Hamilton, artist and aristocrat, she became close friends with Queen Maria Carolina of the Two Sicilies. As the daughter of the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa and the sister of the recently executed Marie Antoinette, Maria Carolina had learned a lot of first-hand lessons about government. Some good, some bad. She needed them, since her husband Ferdinand was ... to put it kindly ... developmentally challenged. Maria Carolina was functionally ruling the kingdom, giving Emma enormous influence. As the Napoleonic wars heated up, Emma was playing a critical diplomatic role, even taking the lead in organising the court's evacuation to Sicily in the face of a threatened revolution.

This is where things get weird, and where we enter the story Emma is best known for. The Hamiltons provided political support for Nelson and nursed him back to health after the Battle of the Nile. They were good friends. At some point, Emma and Nelson became lovers. The ageing Hamilton didn't seem to mind. Demonstrating that the trend for the press turning against favourites is an old one, a series of political cartoons illustrate how the London papers made Emma the villain. Though their love was ardent and sincere, society never accepted the fallen Lady Hamilton's relationship with their naval hero.

The final rooms show the life they tried to make together, despite public disapproval and Nelson's wife. (Lord Hamilton died two years before Nelson, eliminating half of their barrier, but Lady Nelson refused divorce.) Nelson's letters displayed here are filled with passionate love and firm instructions to pour all of the proceeds of his successful career into furnishing the house they shared together. You can see drawings of the place and some of the furniture, along with a painting of their daughter Horatia. It's most striking for the fact that the painter chooses a pose similar to one that made the young Emma famous. He tries to conjure the old magic, but the daughter was a sadly plain girl with a wistful expression ... as if to embody the tragedy in store for both her parents.

Particularly poignant is the display of Nelson's will, scribbled hastily the night before the famous battle that killed him, begging the government to take care of Emma. The government ignored him. Emma could have lived quietly on the pension she received from Lord Hamilton's estate, but she was too used to the high life. The final room of the exhibit exposes the full tragedy of her fall, as she has to sell off the house she shared with Nelson, ends up in debtor's prison, moves to Calais to escape her creditors and dies of liver failure brought on by attempting to drink away her despair. The parting sight is Nelson's dress uniform. Empty. Ghostly. A haunting image of the love that sent a remarkable woman's life on a trajectory to doom.

Well done to the National Maritime Museum for trying to redress history's crimes of omission. Emma Hamilton deserves to be so much more than the a sexual footnote of famous man's story. She has an amazing life all her own, and this exhibit does a fine job telling us about it. The show's on until 17 April, more info here.