Royal portraits are enjoying a spike in attention at present. While art historians are salivating over the recent discovery of the Catherine of Aragon pendant, Hever Castle, the childhood home of her successor as queen, is capitalising on its Tudor connection by mounting Capturing a Queen: The Image of Anne Boleyn. It has assembled the greatest number of portraits believed to be of Boleyn ever attempted (Guinness, take note).
Curators Owen Emmerson and Kate McCaffrey say it is a “fitting [way] to mark the quincentennial anniversary of Henry VIII’s courtship of Anne”. I look forward to the quincentennial exhibition marking her execution too.
It looks on paper like an engaging bit of art historical research, connoisseurship and visual analysis to complement the inherent richness of the castle’s historical fabric. The show is spearheaded by recent technical analysis of its own Hever “Rose” Boleyn portrait – establishing it as the earliest known rose-holding variant – plus new hypotheses such as that, contrary to popular belief, Henry VIII did not systematically erase all Boleyn imagery post her 1536 execution. Overarching the whole enterprise is the question: what did Anne Boleyn look like? The curators know the irresistible allure of true likeness: of seeing the real face that inspired a million TV shows, films, musicals; and just happened to precipitate a slight tiff with Rome which would alter the course of religion in England.
As it pans out, the question of real likeness becomes muddied with the concept of depictions during Boleyn’s lifetime or subsequent centuries. The selection of images on show seems very much dictated by availability but also an obsession with amassing as many as possible. It is certainly a surreal moment to walk into a collection of Boleyn portraits dating from the 16th to 18th century, assembled in one low-ceilinged exhibition space in the winding, spiral staircase-punctuated castle. All Annes are depicted in three-quarter profile head and shoulders, of roughly similar scale, bearing varying assortments of iconographic regalia.
From an organisational standpoint alone the assembly is a feat. Remarkable for example is the presence of a portrait from the Countess of Rosse collection, which the curators ague closely resembles that of the famous National Portrait Gallery; or the Lyndhurst Mansion portrait on loan in the UK for the first time. Emmerson is clearly a fanatical collector himself, with a considerable number of his own pieces of Boleyn-related stuff on show, including a 19th-century replica of the clock given to Anne by Henry on their wedding day (the original is in the royal collection), plus The Arrest of Anne Boleyn, a painting from about 1870. This highlights problems regarding availability. It is notable that the most convincing piece for the thesis that Elizabeth I reinstated iconographic links to Boleyn – the Chequers Ring showing Elizabeth and her mother, Anne, – is represented here by a photograph on a funereal little stand, the real thing tucked away at the prime minister’s Buckinghamshire retreat.
Trying to define Boleyn’s real likeness is an impossibility. Tudor portraiture was conceived more to solidify a specific aura of piety, power and prestige combined with base reference to the original face, a practice continued through to Elizabethan times as exemplified by the Virgin Queen’s deliberately mask-like, impassive visage in portraits of her. The assembly resembles fun-house mirrors because Anne’s rough likeness is evidently used a kind of template, with each subsequent artist attempting the same proportions to varying levels of accuracy.
The curators ask: “Do any of these faces show the real Anne Boleyn, or only the legend she became?” Only the rare talent of Holbein, it seems, was capable of or willing to imbue his portraits with a human warmth and verisimilitude, visible in the facsimile of a drawing showing Anne looking down, in profile, and conspicuously by physiognomy different radically to all the other cookie-cutter ones. Is it actually of Anne, though? The caption states: “New research argues convincingly that it is the most complete contemporary likeness of Anne to survive.” Where is this tantalising new research? Not readily available to the regular visitor, it seems.
Displaying the collection of Anne portraits – spanning a couple of centuries, with tangled relationships between various groupings – together makes it hard work for the casual viewer to follow, not helped by some chaotic labelling. There is no key explaining the stamp some labels bear indicating their association with the so-called “Bradford”, “Pearl” and “Rose”, “Windsor”, and “Moost happi” groups, and of these which piece is the “original” inspiration for its counterparts. Throughout, one must contend with such slippery language as for Nidd Hall’s portrait described as “one of the most persuasive likenesses associated with Anne Boleyn”.
Visitors are asked to vote on a little screen for the group (were you paying attention at the back?) that “best represents” Anne Boleyn, sidestepping the impossible question of likeness but instead asking, well, what exactly? To find Anne’s definitive image, unfortunately we don’t have a skull dug up from a car park for reconstructive wizards to answer that question once and for all.
Capturing a Queen: The Image of Anne Boleyn is at Hever Castle, Kent until 2 January 2027
