Some Grey Matter

        Subsequent to the publication in December 2005 of my article on a possible portrait of Lady Jane Grey now in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge), there has been a flurry of identifications of other possible portraits of England’s elusive “nine-days queen.”[1] She remains one of the most prominent of Tudor-era female figures for whom there is no positively identified portrait known also to have been painted during her lifetime. At least one of the newly-identified putative portraits was certainly created at least forty years after Jane’s death. Indeed, there is no shortage of posthumous and imagined portraits and pictures of her.[2] Other pictures may be life portraits of Jane Grey, but they require further study to make such identifications more definitive.

        At the same time that I was conducting research on the Fitzwilliam portrait, art history student Hope Walker was studying the same picture, though we were each unaware at the time of the other’s work. Ms. Walker has since published an alternative identification for the sitter depicted in the Fitzwilliam portrait.[3] She suggests that the young lady depicted is Lady Jane Dormer, a close friend of Queen Mary Tudor and later Duchess of Feria. Her argument is a convincing one, and her suggested identification deserves further study.

        In early 2006, Christopher Foley of Lane Fine Art ( London) presented to the public for the first time a portrait discovered in a house in Streatham, a neighborhood in the London borough of Lambeth.[4] The portrait is inscribed “Lady Jayne,” leading Foley and others to conclude, after considerable additional research, that the sitter is Lady Jane Grey. That identification was sufficiently solid that the National Portrait Gallery purchased the painting (NPG accession number 6804) for a reported £100,000 and will be placing it on permanent display in the Tudor Gallery in the spring of 2007, following conservation work.[5] The portrait is a posthumous one, however, and was not painted before the early 1590s. Some authorities believe it may be a later copy of a lost original, since a nearly identical second version of it, called the Houghton portrait, is known to exist. In my opinion, the Streatham portrait is indeed a picture of Lady Jane Grey, though probably as some late-sixteenth-century artist imagined her to have looked and not a copy of a previous original that is now lost. Regardless, its very crude execution and the certainty that it was painted no earlier than the 1590s renders it largely useless for determining Jane’s actual appearance.

        Following the National Portrait Gallery’s announcement that it had acquired the Streatham Portrait, the London galleries of Philip Mould, Ltd. began work on an exhibition entitled “Lost Faces: Identity and Discovery in Tudor Royal Portraiture.” The exhibition was guest curated by Dr. David Starkey, a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College at Cambridge University, a prominent scholar on the subject of Elizabeth I, and a well-known radio and television host and commentator. The exhibition opened for a twelve-day run on 6 March 2007 to positive reviews in all of the major London newspapers.[6] Each review focused in particular on a miniature painting now owned by the Yale University Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut. Dr. Starkey argues in the exhibition catalogue that the miniature is a life portrait of Jane Grey created either in connection with her marriage to Guildford Dudley in May 1553 or, alternatively, during or shortly after her brief reign of 10–19 July 1553.[7] While this is certainly an exciting and potentially promising discovery, there are issues with the evidence and argument that must be clarified before the "Starkey miniature," as the has press dubbed it (though it is more properly the "Yale Miniature"), can be accepted as an authentic life portrait of Jane.

        A second picture in the exhibition, this one full size, has been identified by Bendor Grosvenor, a director at Philip Mould, Ltd., as a possible additional portrait of Lady Jane Grey. The painting, sometimes called the Wrest Park portrait in reference to the residence in which it formerly hung, is remarkable among potential portraits of Lady Jane for the proto-Puritan style of costume worn by the sitter. Like the miniature, it has been identified in part through reference to the flowers inserted in the lady's decolletage. Interestingly, the portrait has belonged to descendants of a collateral branch of the Grey family since at least 1701. Mr. Grosvenor has observed that the Wrest Park portrait "seems to be a consciously historical portrait, which would perhaps suggest that it is posthumous."[8] This seems to me to be the case. I believe it unlikely that the portrait was done from life.

        The "Acknowledgements" of the Lost Faces exhibition catalogue begins by stating that the purpose of the exhibition was to "raise questions, stimulate debate, and, where appropriate, suggest answers." While I do not claim to have the answers, I feel qualified, as Jane Grey's only academic biographer, to enter into the debate and to suggest some avenues for further inquiry and discussion. By following the links provided in the text above or in the list below, the reader will find my assessment of each of the four potential portraits of Lady Jane Grey. I hope in the near future to include as well the full text of Hope Walker's proposed alternate identity for the Fitzwilliam portrait, a discussion that presently can be accessed only through the Lost Faces exhibition catalogue, so that readers can obtain from one resource both sides of the debate on that picture. With any luck, at least one of these four portraits will eventually be reliably confirmed as an authentic life-portrait of Lady Jane, or, failing that, perhaps some other "lost face" portrait will emerge in the future to stun us all.

J. Stephan Edwards, Ph.D.

 

       The Fitzwilliam Portrait              The Streatham Portrait

       The Yale Miniature                     The Wrest Park Portrait

 

Notes:

[1] J. Stephan Edwards, “A New Face for the Lady,” History Today 55, no. 12 (Dec. 2005): 44 – 45.

[2] For the most thorough cataloguing available of posthumous and fictional portraits of Lady Jane Grey, see The Lady Jane Grey Internet Museum, created and maintained by Sonja Marie Isaacs.

[3] Hope Walker, “A Portrait of Lady Jane Dormer, Later Duchess of Feria?” in Lost Faces: Identity and Discovery in Tudor Royal Portraiture ( London: Philip Mould, Ltd., 2007), 86–87.

[4] “Is this the true face of Lady Jane?”, The Guardian, 16 January 2006.

[5] “A rare portrait of Lady Jane Grey? Or just an ‘appallingly bad picture’?”, The Guardian, 11 November 2006. See also National Portrait Gallery, “What’s On? Lady Jane Grey” (NPG 6804).

[6] See "The True Beauty of Lady Jane Grey," The Telegraph, 4 March 2007; "Brooch identifies portrait as Lady Jane Grey, the girl who reigned for nine days," The Independent, 4 March 2007; "Miniature could be second view of Lady Jane Grey," The Guardian, 4 March 2007; "Why Starkey believes this is the unknown face of the teenage Queen," The Times, 5 March 2007.

[7] David Starkey, Bendor Grosvenor, and Alasdair Hawkyard, "The Search for Lady Jane Grey" in Lost Faces: Identity and Discovery in Tudor Royal Portraiture (London: Philip Mould, Ltd., 2007), 79 – 83.

[8] Bendor Grosvenor and David Starkey, "The Search for Lady Jane Grey" in Lost Faces: Identity and Discovery in Tudor Royal Portraiture (London: Philip Mould, Ltd., 2007), 85– 86.