Lady Jane Grey (by an Unknown Artist, The National Portrait Gallery)
Abstract: A portrait inscribed 'Lady Jayne' acquired by The National Portrait Gallery in 2006 has met with some controversy as to whether it was truly of Lady Jane Grey (1537-1554). A print of Jane, linked to a 1581 French edition of Theodore Beza's 'Icones' (1580) supports the identity of the sitter.
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In writing a biography
of the ill-fated 'Nine Days Queen', historian Eric Ives aptly entitled his book
Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery.1
Owing to the brevity of her reign, not to mention her very existence - Jane was
executed at the age of sixteen in 1554 - many aspects of her life have remained
puzzling. Was her accession legitimate or unlawful, what precisely was her
profession of faith, what was she like as an individual, and what did she
actually look like?
Regarding her
appearance, Jane Grey's portraiture has been problematic - not because of a
lack of images, but rather the contrary. A number of likenesses are purported
to be of her, but few have stood up to scrutiny.2
Of this handful, there is arguably only one portrait that can be confidently
identified as the Lady Jane. Acquired by The National Portrait Gallery (London)
in 2006, it is a panel of a young woman in a crimson dress, holding a book, and
is labelled Lady Jayne.
This apparently lost
painting was discovered in a house in Streatham in south London in 2006.
According to its owner, it had been inherited from his great-grandfather. The
picture, it ought to be said, was not exactly unknown. The NPG was aware of it
since 1923 when the owner's family tried - unsuccessfully - to get the museum
to authenticate it as a portrait of Lady Jane Grey.3
The NPG had even kept it on file, notating it as belonging to a 'private
collection'. Subsequently, the picture came to the attention of art dealer Christopher
Foley who arranged for its sale to The NPG.
The acquisition was not
without controversy. Historian David Starkey, who was meanwhile championing a
very different image as Jane Grey - a miniature from The Yale Center for
British Art4 - did
not mince words. He openly accused The NPG of wasting public money to buy 'an
appalling bad picture'. "There's absolutely no reason to suppose it's got
anything to do with Lady Jane Grey", he went on. "There is no
documentary evidence, no evidence from inventories, jewellery, or heraldry to
support the idea this is Lady Jane Grey. It depends on mere hearsay and
tradition, and that is not good enough."5
Starkey's comments about The NPG's 'rather deplorable acquisition' as he called it,6
started a public row with Christopher Foley. "The painting is exactly
where it should be. It's not a great work of art, but it is a substantial piece
of history", Foley shot back. "The evidence has been supported by
people who know far more about the science of painting than David Starkey. I
don't know what his problem is - is it because he didn't find it"? As for the picture not being a tour de force of royal portraiture,
"who says all pictures of monarchs have to be masterpieces"? Foley asked.
"A great number of contemporary portraits of Elizabeth I look like pub
signs".7
Naturally, The NPG
stood by Foley and its purchase - said
to have cost some £100,000. Tarnya Cooper, the 16th Century Curator at the
museum, jumped into the fray, responding to Starkey's remark that the painting
should have more going for it. "That's just wrong", she said.
"Evidence from heraldry and so on very rarely exists... Its value is as a
historical document rather than a work of art".8
The science that Foley
had spoken of seemed to support the painting as a genuine portrait of Jane
Grey. While some Tudor era paintings did have the identity of the sitter added
in later on, University College London, who did a technical examination of the
picture, found the inscription to be contemporaneous. According to researcher
Libby Sheldon, it 'appears to have been put on at the same time as the rest of
the paint'.9
And as for the portrait as a whole dating to around Jane Grey's lifetime, 'the
composition of the lead tin yellow paint and its chalk background matches other
paintings from that period', Sheldon concluded.10
Historical records appeared
to sustain the sitter's identity as well. "If it's not Lady Jane Grey, who
could it be"? asked Foley. "We checked every 'Jane' in the English
aristocracy in the 16th century. There was no other plausible candidate".11
Other external evidence
may lend support to the Streatham young woman as being Lady Jane Grey. Her
image is related to a print comparable to a series of portraits found in the book
Icones, id est Verae imagines virorum
doctrina simul e pietate illustratrium. Written by the theologian Theodore
Beza (1519-1605), it consisted of a collection of biographies, composed in
Latin, of Protestant notables. Some of them were depicted by woodcuts.12
Published in Geneva in 1580, the book proved so popular that in the following
year, it was rereleased. The new edition was translated into French by Beza's
co-religionist Simon Goulard (1548-1628), who also added some new images.
Icones, id est Verae imagines... by Theodore Beza (1580)
Lady Jane Grey (by an Unknown Artist, The Royal Collection)
Where Beza had labelled
the portraits of his Protestant sitters in Latin, Goulard did so in French. The
print of Jane Grey is identified as 'Jeanne Gray'. Obviously, this particular image
was intended for Goulard's edition. But strangely enough, it does not appear in the 1581 copy, nor in the original by Beza, (where her name would have been Latinized). Her
likeness is of precisely the same format as those of five sitters found in the Icones: William Tyndale, Ambrose Blaurer,
Joachim Vadian, Peter Viret, and Francis Vatable.13All are placed within an oval, and they share the same distinctive frame as
Jane's image. Evidently, she was originally meant to be one of Beza's esteemed
Protestants, but for some reason was left out before publication. Goulard may have later intended to put Jane back in, along with a discarded biography of her, but apparently, he too decided not to as well.
It was certainly not on account of Jane's sex. Margaret of Valois (the sister of King Francis I of France) was included in the Icones as a Reformist, though she is the only female. Nonetheless, Jane Grey is mentioned though in brief. She appears in the section on Henry Bullinger, where she is described as being a correspondent of his, and that she had sent him a pair of her gloves as a memento before her death.14
It was certainly not on account of Jane's sex. Margaret of Valois (the sister of King Francis I of France) was included in the Icones as a Reformist, though she is the only female. Nonetheless, Jane Grey is mentioned though in brief. She appears in the section on Henry Bullinger, where she is described as being a correspondent of his, and that she had sent him a pair of her gloves as a memento before her death.14
William Tyndale, Ambrose Blaurer, Joachim Vadian, Peter Viret, and Francis Vatable (by an Unknown Artist, from Theodore Beza's Icones)
That Jane Grey was
considered for Beza's Icones, meant
that this image of her was accepted as a true likeness in the Elizabethan era.
Its source was undoubtedly an image associated with The NPG/Streatham painting.
As The NPG/Streatham picture is believed to have been made 'some forty years'
after Jane's death,15
thus dating it to sometime in the mid 1590s, Beza's 'Jeanne Gray' was likely created
from an earlier copy that had made its way to the Continent. That a likeness of
Jane Grey, taken ad vivum, existed can be inferred from an
inventory of the possessions of Elizabeth of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury
(1527-1608) made in 1559. In it, a 'table' (that is a panel painting) of 'my
Lady Jane' was described as being in Elizabeth's bedchamber.16
The Countess had known Jane Grey personally, and was close to the rest of her
family as well. She must surely have had an authentic likeness of her friend, gone
for only five years, and so special that it was placed in the intimacy of her
bedroom. Could this have been the original version of The NPG/Streatham portrait?17
NOTES
1 Eric Ives, Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor
Mystery, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
2 For
a thorough examination of the various portraits: J. Stephan Edwards, A Queen of a New Invention: Portraits of Lady Jane Grey Dudley,
England's Nine Days Queen, Palm Springs: Old John Publishing,
2015. See also: Bendor Grosvenor (editor), Lost
Faces: Identity and Discovery in Tudor Royal Portraiture, London: Philip
Mould Ltd., 2007, pp. 79-87; Roy Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, London: H.M.S.O, I, pp. 75-79; and Eric Ives, Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor
Mystery, pp. 15-17.
3 Charlotte
Higgins, 'A rare portrait of Lady Jane Grey? Or just an 'appallingly bad
picture'?' The Guardian, November 11,
2006.
4 Bendor
Grosvenor (editor), Lost Faces: Identity
and Discovery in Tudor Royal Portraiture, pp. 79-83.
5 Charlotte
Higgins, 'A rare portrait of Lady Jane Grey? Or just an 'appallingly bad
picture'?'
6 Charlotte
Higgins, 'Miniature could be second view of Lady Jane Grey' The Guardian, March 5, 2007.
7 ibid.
8 ibid.
9 Charlotte Higgins, 'Is this the true face of Lady Jane?' The Guardian, January 16, 2006.
10 'Portrait
'is ex-queen Lady Jane', BBC News,
January 17, 2006. The curators of the Lost
Faces exhibition disagreed as to the lack of other noblewomen with that
name. For example, there was the young Lady Jane Browne in the reign of Queen
Mary. See: Bendor Grosvenor (editor), Lost
Faces: Identity and Discovery in Tudor Royal Portraiture, p. 81.
11 Charlotte
Higgins, 'A rare portrait of Lady Jane Grey? Or just an 'appallingly bad
picture'?'
12 The
differing styles and qualities of the woodcuts indicate they were by various
artists.
13 Goulard's
1581 edition has William Tyndale misidentified as John Knox.
14 C.G. McCrie (editor), Beza's "Icones" - Contemporary
Portraits of Reformers of Religion and Letters, Being Facsimile Reproductions
of the Portraits in Beza's "Icones" (1580) and in Goulard's Edition
(1581), London: The Religious Tract Society, 1906, p. 117.
16 Chatsworth Devonshire MSS, Hardwick Hall Drawers H/143/6, f.3v transcribed in Gillian
White, 'That whyche ys nedefoulle and nesesary’: The Nature and Purpose of
the Original Furnishings and Decoration of Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire
(Ph.D. dissertation, University of Warwick, 2005), vol. 2, p. 409.
17 At
present, there are two known variants, one at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, and the
other called the 'Norris Portrait' (present whereabouts unknown) after its last
known owner. A third version, once belonging to Reverend Peter Peckard of
Magdalene College, Cambridge (as notated on a stipple engraving of it by
Francesco Bartolozzi, published in 1790, though mistakenly called 'Jane Shore';
NPG D24103) is now lost. A half-length of Queen Katharine Parr (Private Collection) has her wearing a similar costume and jewelry as the NPG/Streatham and Norris portraits. The Beza woodcut could not have been mistakenly derived from the picture of Katharine as it is clearly identified as her (with the inscription CATHARINA REGINA VXOR HENRICI VIII).
