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The portrait recently went on display at England's Wrest Park. English Heritage
In the summer of 1553, a girl of around 16 was proclaimed the queen of England. Her name was Lady Jane Grey, and she ruled for just nine days before being executed at the Tower of London. Her reign was the shortest in British history.
Grey went down in history as a Protestant martyr—an innocent “pawn in the ruthless ambition that defined the Tudor court,” as the Guardian’s Nadia Khomami writes. While many portraits of the so-called “nine-day queen” immortalized her after her death, historians have never identified a portrait of Grey painted during her lifetime. Until now. Maybe.
This month, a painting depicting an unidentified woman in an elegant black dress went on display at Wrest Park, an 18th-century mansion in England. According to experts at English Heritage, which manages Wrest Park and many other historic English sites, the painting may be the only portrait of Grey created before her execution.
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Researchers say the painting was altered after its completion. English Heritage
Rachel Turnbull, English Heritage’s senior collections conservator, worked with researchers from the Courtauld Institute of Art and dendrochronologist Ian Tyers, who studies tree rings, on a recent analysis of the portrait.
“While we can’t confirm that this is definitely Lady Jane Grey, our results certainly make a compelling argument,” Turnbull says in a statement. “It is possible that we are looking at the shadows of a once more royal portrait of Lady Jane Grey, toned down into subdued, Protestant martyrdom after her death.”
Grey was born in around 1537, about a decade before the reign of Edward VI, the only surviving legitimate son of Henry VIII. Grey had a direct link to Henry: She was one of his great-nieces—a “genuine claimant to the throne,” according to the British royal family’s website. In 1553, when Edward fell deathly ill, he named Grey as his heir. But when Grey rose to power, England rejected her in favor of Mary Tudor, the first daughter of Henry and a devout Catholic. Mary took the throne, and Grey was executed for treason.
“For many years this painting was part of the historic collection at Wrest Park, having been acquired by Anthony Grey, 11th Earl of Kent, in 1701, as an image of Lady Jane Grey,” Peter Moore, the curator at Wrest Park, says in the statement. “It remained the defining image of the ‘nine-days queen’ for over 300 years, until its attribution was thrown into doubt and its identity rejected.”
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An engraved portrait of Grey created by Esme de Boulonois in 1682 Nicolas de Larmessin and Esme de Boulonois via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0
The portrait in question was painted on a wooden panel, which researchers have dated to between 1539 and roughly 1571—a period encompassing most of Grey’s life. The panels were also marked with a merchant symbol “identical to a mark used on a royal portrait of King Edward VI,” per the statement.
Experts also looked beneath the painting’s surface using infrared reflectography, and they found that the subject’s clothing had been changed after the portrait’s completion. The sleeves and coif had been altered, and the white scarf around her shoulders may have been added later. At some point, the woman’s eyes, mouth and ears had been deliberately scratched out, perhaps in an “iconoclastic attack,” per English Heritage.
English Heritage’s theory isn’t new. In 2007, British art historian Bendor Grosvenor and historian David Starkey conducted a similar analysis of the portrait, which they included in an exhibition at London’s Philip Mould gallery. Their research also included dendrochronological analysis.
“It was a little strange seeing the English Heritage press release suggesting their research was some kind of new discovery or conclusion,” Grosvenor tells the Art Newspaper’s Joe Ware. “But I’m glad the picture is going on public display again with some fanfare, and the new infrared images are interesting.”
Meanwhile, other experts aren’t convinced that the portrait depicts the nine-day queen. As independent researcher J. Stephan Edwards, who specializes in Grey’s life and paintings of the queen, tells the Washington Post’s Victoria Craw, “I don’t believe any of it is compelling evidence that the sitter could be Jane Grey.”
In 2013, Edwards published an article in the British Art Journal arguing that the portrait in question actually depicts Mary Neville Fiennes, Lady Dacre, who lived between 1524 and 1576. As Edwards tells the Washington Post, he thinks the dendrochronological findings are “noncontributory” to the mystery of the sitter, as his analysis already concluded the painting dated to the mid-1500s.
“It is a discussion, and there are no definitive conclusions,” Edwards adds. But he finds his conclusion “more persuasive” than the “supposed new evidence.”
The Execution of Lady Jane Grey Painting by Paul Delaroche
The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, Paul Delaroche, 1833 Paul Delaroche / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
In any case, the portrait stands in contrast to the most famous illustration of the doomed queen: In 1833, the French artist Paul Delaroche painted Grey with a cloth tied over her eyes as she awaits execution, as historical novelist Philippa Gregory says in the statement.
If the Wrest Park portrait does depict Grey, it’s “a valuable addition to the portraiture of this young heroine, as a woman of character—a powerful challenge to the traditional representation of her as a blindfolded victim,” says Gregory.
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