Another ‘New’ Portrait Said to Depict Jane Grey Dudley

‘New’ or previously unknown portraits said to depict Jane Grey Dudley continue to appear at a rate of about one every two years. The most recent example appeared just a few months following the publication in February 2024 of the revised edition of Portraits of Jane Grey Dudley, England’s Nine Days Queen. Lee Porritt of Lady Jane Grey Revisited and Hope Walker of HansEworth.com each alerted me to the ‘new’ portrait after it came to auction through Bearnes, Hampton, and Littlewood (BHL) in Exeter, Devon, UK in July 2024.

The auction catalogue described the painting as “British School, 19^th Century” and noted the inscription on the painted surface that reads, “LADI JANE DOUGHTER OF THE DVKE OF SVFFOLK, A[nn]o Do[mini] 1553.” BHL did not provide any further information on the item but gave it a pre-sale estimate of £400-600. It ultimately sold for a reported £900 to a well-known art dealer in Surrey.

The Surrey dealer likely spotted a so-called “sleeper,” or an auction item that has been misidentified and is therefore priced well below its actual value. In the absence of any provenance for the item, BHL assessed the portrait as nineteenth century in origin, but there are many elements of the portrait suggesting the strong possibility that it was created early in the sixteenth century. As a general rule, greater age means greater value owing to simple rarity.

The portrait is executed on a wood panel support, the grain pattern of which suggests oak. Artists switched from wood panels to canvas in the seventeenth century, so that wood panels are not commonly seen in the nineteenth-century context. The reverse of the panel is chamfered across the upper and lower margins, consistent with sixteenth century practice. The visible wood is significantly oxidized, characteristic of great age.

The appearance of the identifying inscription likewise suggests a strong possibility that the painting is much older than currently thought. The spelling of both ‘Ladi’ with an ‘i’ and ‘doughter’ with an ‘o’ reflects the phonetically based spelling of the sixteenth century, before standardized spelling was developed for the English language. The use of ‘v’ for ‘u’, as seen here in the words duchess, daughter, and Suffolk, was also common practice in the sixteenth century but had disappeared by the nineteenth century.

Elements of the sitter’s costume likewise indicate an origin in the sixteenth century, especially when we consider the chronological consistency across those several elements. Every one of those elements point narrowly to the specific period between ca.1520 and ca.1540. The profile of the French hood, with a rounded crown following the natural contours of the head and sides that cover the ears and extend down to the angle of the jaw, is very similar in shape to the hood worn by Mary Tudor Brandon, Jane Grey’s paternal grandmother, in a portrait dated to about 1516 (below left). It is also similar to the French hoods worn by the sitter in each of the many portraits of Mary Magdalene and of female musicians painted in the 1520s by The Master of the Female Half-Lengths (below middle), including and especially the Althorp Portrait (below right) formerly said to depict Jane Grey Dudley (see Edwards, Portraits, pp.140-145). French hoods became flat across the top after about 1550, with a sharp angle as they extended down the sides of the head, as seen in portraits of Queen Mary I ca.1555.

The wide pleating of the lady’s undersleeves is again characteristic of fashions of the 1520s and 1530s. Similar sleeves are seen in Hans Holbein’s portraits of Mary, Lady Guildford of 1527 (below left) and Margaret Roper of 1535-6 (below center), as well as in a portrait of Jane Seymour ca.1536-7 from Holbein’s studio (below right). They are not seen in portraits painted after about 1540.

Pending dendrochronological (tree-ring) analysis of the wood of the panel, the possibility that the portrait dates to the first half of the sixteenth century cannot be ruled out. Dendrochronological analysis may also reveal a geographic origin for the wood, which may in turn provide evidence for the likely geographic origin of the painting (English versus Continental). But that study has not yet been performed.

If the portrait proves to be sixteenth century in origin, the inscription was likely added two or more decades after the painting was created. The reference in the inscription to the Duchess of Suffolk rather than to the Duke of Suffolk is unusual in the sixteenth century context, however. Tudor society was distinctly patriarchal, and the identity of one’s father was of greater social and cultural importance than that of one’s mother, in normal circumstances. But the reference here to the mother may be explained by genealogy. Jane possessed royal blood through her mother’s descent from King Henry VII, not through her father. The reference to Jane’s mother may have been intended to highlight Jane’s claim to royal status and to the Crown of England through her mother.

One clue to the sitter’s true identity may lie in the pendant bodice jewel suspended from her bodice trim (above). That jewel takes the shape of a love-heart, and the center is set with a small gold ‘E’. Because the letter is applied to a love-heart, it seems reasonable to assume that the jewel is a love token referencing the forename of either the sitter or a suitor or husband of the sitter. The use of letters or monograms as love tokens is perhaps most famously associated in the sixteenth century context with Henry VIII and several of his many wives, especially Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. Jane wedded Guildford Dudley in May of 1553, so the ‘E’ monogram cannot reference either Jane or her husband. The reference for the ‘E’ monogram remains unknown at present.

It is also possible that the painting is a deliberate forgery created in the nineteenth century to capitalize on the contemporary resurgence in popularity of Jane Grey in English culture as a heroic religious and political figure. Writers, artists, and historians frequently took Jane Grey as their subject matter in a wide variety of media, including plays, poems, early novels, prescriptive literature, scene paintings, and antiquarian collections. But outright forgery seems unlikely. The collective chronological precision of the costume, for example, is inconsistent with the level of historical awareness present in the nineteenth century, when artists possessed only a limited understanding of costume history.

More commonly, even well-regarded artists tended to depict a variety of costume styles from across the broader Tudor period within a single scene painting. In the famous painting (above left) by Paul Delaroche depicting Jane’s execution, for example, her ladies wear anachronistic Spanish gabled hoods, and the executioner is dressed in leggings evocative of previous centuries. In John Singleton Copley’s The Offer of the Crown to Lady Jane Grey (above right), several of the courtiers wear ruffs of a size and shape that did not become fashionable until after 1565. It seems improbable that any but a master forger would have depicted the costume details so correctly and with such chronological consistency. And the effort expended to do so would have far exceeded any compensation from a future sale of the small painting. It is therefore unlikely that the portrait, if produced in the nineteenth century, was intended to deceive a potential buyer by passing as sixteenth century in origin.

If the painting was indeed executed in the nineteenth century, as the catalogue indicates, it may be a copy of some unknown original, with the identifying inscription added to make the portrait ‘become’ Jane Grey.

But the evidence currently available suggests a strong possibility, even probability, that the painting was created in the second or third decade of the sixteenth century. Since Jane Grey Dudley was born late in 1536 or early in 1537, it is exceedingly unlikely that the painting is a life portrait of Jane. The painting is far more probably a portrait of some other as-yet-unknown lady of those earlier decades that was subsequently relabeled to ‘become’ Jane.

J. Stephan Edwards, PhD, FSA
Palm Springs, California
29 September 2024