Panel Painting Portrait of a Lady

Oil on oak panel portrait of a lady, previously identified as Jane Seymour.

If, as traditionally claimed, this is the companion portrait of one of the Society’s pictures of the ageing Henry VIII and, by implication, represents one of the king’s wives, it is likely to be a posthumous image of Jane Seymour (c 1508/9-37), who, from 4 June 1536 until her death on 24 October 1537, was briefly Henry’s third consort. The fact that the sitter does not closely resemble the reliable likeness that we have of Jane does not rule out the possibility that this was intended as her portrait, though the sitter’s identity continues to be a matter for debate.

Thomas Kerrich believed, as doubtless did Dick Reynolds who gave him the painting in 1781, that this was the pair of the portrait of Henry VIII (LDSAL 334) that he acquired at the same time, which naturally led him to speculate that it depicted one of the king’s wives. The first intimation that this was specifically Jane Seymour appeared in 1828, in the annotated list of the pictures in Kerrich’s bequest to the Society. Alfred Way recorded in his catalogue of the Society’s collection almost twenty years later that it was thought to represent Jane Seymour, without expressing an opinion. Scharf, having rejected Henry VIII as the subject of the supposed companion portrait, was naturally not disposed to think of this as a picture of one of the king’s wives, declaring that there were no grounds for calling it a portrait of Jane Seymour. Nevertheless, the view that Jane was the subject persisted until at least the end of the nineteenth century and the suggestion has never been categorically repudiated. As with the alleged companion portrait and the Society’s other painting of Henry VIII, there appears to be a velvet cushion below the sitter’s hands, a detail shared with the portrait of the king attributed to Joos van Cleve in the Royal Collection.

In the Society’s portrait, unlike Holbein’s contemporary likeness of Jane, the sitter’s bodice is made of costly cloth of gold, implying that her status is extremely high. Although she was described as ‘splendidly dressed’ by the imperial ambassador to London shortly before her marriage to Henry, there is no mention in the wardrobe accounts of any garments made for Jane from this particular luxury fabric. However, in the posthumous image of Jane as Henry’s late consort in the Tudor dynastic painting of c 1545 at Hampton Court, seated beside the king in her capacity as co-progenitor of England’s Protestant succession (Jane having borne him a son who survived beyond infancy), she is dressed in a sumptuous cloth of gold gown. Her pale oval face, depicted almost a decade after her death, is a conventionalised representation, rather than a likeness. This representation of Jane may well have been the basis for the image in the Society’s painting.