Anne Boleyn
Unknown English artist · Late sixteenth century, after a lost original of about 1533 to 1536
Anne Boleyn wears a French hood edged with pearls, a black gown and a pearl necklace with a gold letter B hanging from it. Her face is oval and pale, her dark eyes calm, her lips pressed together in the faintest smile. It is a small, quiet picture, and it is the image that has stood in for Henry the Eighth's second queen for more than four hundred years, reproduced on book covers and in every film about her.
No portrait of Anne from her own lifetime survives; after her execution in fifteen thirty six her images were destroyed or hidden. This panel was painted decades later, probably from a lost original, at a time when her daughter Elizabeth was on the throne and Anne could be shown again with pride. The B pendant is the detail everyone looks for. Look also at the careful pattern of the pearls on the hood and at the flat, slightly stiff modelling of the face, typical of workshop portraits made in sets for the long galleries of Elizabethan houses.
The gallery bought the painting in eighteen eighty two. Whether it is a good likeness is impossible to know, though contemporaries described Anne as dark haired, slim and striking rather than conventionally beautiful, which fits. Hanging near Henry and their daughter Elizabeth, the portrait completes a family story of ambition, love, terror and survival that runs through the whole Tudor gallery.
Did You Know? The gold letter B on her necklace made this portrait the model for almost every later image of Anne Boleyn, even though it was painted long after her death.
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