‘She is a he’: Was An Old Woman, the painting that inspired Alice’s Duchess, actually a man?

Quinten Massys' An Old Woman (‘The Ugly Duchess') and An Old Man, both about 1513. Photograph: The National Gallery, London/ Musée Jacquemart-André/Institut de France

Wrinkled, furrowed, jowly and far from attractive, An Old Woman, by the Flemish artist Quinten Massys, is one of the standout paintings in London’s National Gallery. It is usually called “The Ugly Duchess”, after it became the inspiration for Sir John Tenniel’s drawing of the infamous duchess in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Now, five centuries since Massys completed his painting and 150 years after Tenniel’s interpretation, the portrait has been reassessed as neither an old woman nor a duchess, but actually as a male transvestite.