Kate Middleton Visits Tracey Emin’s Home Town and ‘Dead Body’ Art at Turner Contemporary in Margate

Kate Middleton.
Kate Middleton with local children at the Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK. Photo: via @Gerstroyals on Twitter.

Kate Middleton with local children at the Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK.
Photo: via @Gerstroyals on Twitter.

Despite her rapidly-approaching due date, Kate Middleton, the Dutchess of Cambridge, is still out and about, today taking an art-filled trip to the Turner Contemporary in the English seaside town of Margate.

Elegantly attired in a Hobbs dalmatian-print coat she was last seen wearing in 2013, Middleton met with museum officials and trustees, and local artist John Davies, whose sculpture Scarecrow is on display at the museum. Among other artworks, the duchess took in a naked photo of Tracey Emin (Emin grew up in Margate); In the Piss (1997), a full-frontal nude of the duo Gilbert & George; and Jeremy Millar’s controversial Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man (The Willows) (2011), a life-size cast of a man lying face-down on the floor.

Middleton, a known art history–aficionado (see Kate Middleton’s Art History Background Revealed) also revisited Anthony van Dyck‘s last self portrait (circa 1640), which she posed with last year to help promote the successful campaign to purchase the painting for the nation. The painting, which belongs to the National Portrait Gallery (the duchess is a patron of the museum), is included at the Contemporary’s current exhibition, “Self: Image and Identity,” as part of the portrait’s tour of the UK, ongoing through 2017.

Founded in 2011, the Turner Contemporary is located on the former site of a boarding house where the museum’s namesake and recent biopic subject, J.M.W. Turner, used to stay.

The visit wrapped up with a meeting at the institution’s Clore Learning Studio, where Middleton spent time with local children. Afterward, the royal visited Margate’s Restort Studios, converted in 2013 from a Victorian warehouse into work and exhibition spaces for photographers, painters, fashion designers, and filmmakers.

Today’s outing is expected to be the duchess’s penultimate public appearance before she gives birth to her second child, due next month.