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, a student of art history at the Courtauld Institute (London), 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, later Duchess of Feria and a close friend of Queen Mary Tudor. Her argument is a convincing one, and her suggested identification deserves further study. My own subsequent research on other pictures has led me to retract my previous conclusion about the Fitzwilliam portrait. I no longer believe it is a portrait of Jane Grey.

        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 placed it on display in the Tudor Gallery in the spring of 2007 following conservation work.[5] It was removed from display in 2010, however, and remains in storage as of April 2012. The portrait is a posthumous one 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 seemed to me to be the case initially. I believed it unlikely in 2007 that the portrait was done from life. But by March 2011, my research had led me to conclude that the Wrest Park portrait depicts Mary Nevill, Lady Dacre and is not a portrait of Jane Grey, neither from life nor posthumous.

        The ‘Acknowledgements’ of the Lost Faces exhibition catalogue begins by stating that the purpose of that 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 one of Jane Grey’s academic biographers, 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 portraits of Lady Jane Grey mentioned above. Also included are several portraits that have been identified at various times in the more distant past as portraits of Lady Jane. The list will grow as I discover new candidates, as the owners of those paintings lend their cooperation in granting me access to their collections, and as I am able to assess each candidate painting. In early 2010, the Earl of Normanton (Somerley House) and the Earl Spencer (Althorp) were very generous in granting me access to their portraits of Lady Jane. Others have since followed their lead, including Oxford University (the Bodleian Library), the Baron Hastings (formerly of Melton Constable Hall, now at Seaton Delaval Hall [an English Heritage property]), and His Grace the Duke of Northumberland (Syon House). As of April 2011, I have concluded that the Syon portrait is quite possibly the ‘lost portrait’ for which I have been searching. It is likely the closest we shall ever come to getting an authentic image of Lady Jane Grey.

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Page created April 2008, Updated 21 March 2012

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