Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Question from Nasim - Hever Castle portrait of Anne Boleyn

In my reading so far on Anne Boleyn, the Hever Castle portrait of her (where she is holding a rose) is regarding as posthumous. In a recent book by Susan Doran (“The Tudor Chronicles: 1485-1603”), the painting is labelled as an ‘English portrait from 1534’. This may be a general mistake or indeed be the historian’s perception, but I was wondering whether there were other historians advancing the claim that this portrait dates to Anne’s time as queen?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have always wondered this as well!!!!!!!!!! Great question.

Anonymous said...

this portrait definatly isnt contempary, all historians agree on this this author must have made a mistake

Anonymous said...

Definitely not contemporary. The only contemporary image of Anne that the experts can definitely date is a coronation medal. all of the others are much later, Elizabethan at the earliest and often Stuart images. Even the very famous picture of her was identified for several hundred years as Mary Tudor, Henry's sister and was only named as Anne during roughly Victorian times. They adored the romance of the story and one suspects that they may have decided to name any image that might be her, in order to have something to cling to...but that's just my opinion! Jo x