Tudor portrait re-identified

MLE (Emily Cotton) · Post by **MLE (Emily Cotton)** » Thu January 24th, 2013, 10:32 pm

My daughter showed me the unlabeled portrait and asked me which Tudor queen it was. I looked at the lappets (side pieces) on the gable hood and guessed Elizabeth of York (Henry VIII's mother). I was off by a decade -- but what astonishes me is that all those scholars were off by FOUR decades! How could they have missed that the fashion was all wrong for Katherine Parr?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/ ... othes.html
I r

annis · Post by **annis** » Fri January 25th, 2013, 12:35 am

It's surprising how often this happens - one Catherine is as good as another, perhaps? Someone gets a fixed mistaken idea about the subject of a painting and it just continues to be accepted as such until someone else further down the line finally questions it.

One interesting case was that of a portrait in the possession of the Cobbe family, long believed to be that of a woman and identified as Lady Norton because of the name on the back. Turns out it was in fact a portrait of Lady Elizabeth Norton's great-grandfather, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, painted while he was an adolescent. This was the Earl of Southampton who was Shakespeare's patron, and of course not long ago another Cobbe portrait was identified as probably being an original of Shakespeare himself.

Article here:
That's no lady, that's...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/200 ... reducation

Divia · Post by **Divia** » Fri January 25th, 2013, 3:41 am

It really does look like that common picture of Catherine of A that we have all seen before. Hmm, too funny. I suppose when one person calls it there are others who are afraid to dispute it for fear being called dumb or uneducated or something?

That second one is interesting. It totally looks like a chick!

MLE (Emily Cotton) · Post by **MLE (Emily Cotton)** » Fri January 25th, 2013, 7:59 am

Thanks for the portrait, Annis! I'm going to share it with my guild -- he would be the grandson of my Lord Vicount Montague, whose household we play.

Divia, I thought the picture looked a lot like Katherine's older portraits, but I didn't recognize it at first because the image stuck in my head is that of this younger portrait,

which supposedly is of her.

But the more I look at the shape of the nose, the more I wonder if that was really Katherine, or if it was one of her sisters -- Isabella, or Maria, or even Juana.

Madeleine · Post by **Madeleine** » Fri January 25th, 2013, 9:22 am

[quote=""Divia""]It really does look like that common picture of Catherine of A that we have all seen before. Hmm, too funny. I suppose when one person calls it there are others who are afraid to dispute it for fear being called dumb or uneducated or something?

That second one is interesting. It totally looks like a chick!

[/quote]

yep, there is nothing in that portrait which suggests it's a boy....it must have been painted before puberty set in!

Lisa · Post by **Lisa** » Fri January 25th, 2013, 1:18 pm

I would have actually guessed C of A, because the face does look like another portrait of her.

As for the Southampton portrait, it could be a guy... If he were one of the New Romantic crowd in the '80s. It reminds me of a Nicholas Hilliard portrait of A young Elizabeth of Bohemia - she too looks like an '80s pop star, all attitude and long flowing hair

annis · Post by **annis** » Fri January 25th, 2013, 7:53 pm

Posted by Divia

That second one is interesting. It totally looks like a chick!

You can see how that mistake happened- it's a very androgynous image. This is the 3rd Earl of Southampton a few years later. Although it's clearly the same person, now he's a bit older and has cultivated a suave beard there's no mistaking his gender. The very long hair seems to have been a particular affectation of his. He was said to have been very good-looking, and there are some theories around that Shakespeare may have been rather enamoured of him.

Margaret · Post by **Margaret** » Mon January 28th, 2013, 12:49 am

The 3rd Earl of Southampton makes me think of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, with a main character who changed gender while living for centuries. There was a film based on the novel, too, starring Tilda Swinton. YouTube has the trailer.

annis · Post by **annis** » Mon January 28th, 2013, 7:14 am

Yes! He would make a perfect Orlando, though Tilda Swinton made a great Orlando as well. Orlando is my favourite Woolf novel - it's so original and daring in its conception.

Last year the Telegraph published this piece by Tilda Swinton on Woolf's Orlando. I lwas taken by the opening paragraph - a wonderful description of the creative impulse at work.

One morning, Virginia Woolf sat down to work on a critical piece of fiction and, having first dropped her head in her hands in despair: “dipped my pen in the ink, and wrote these words as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando: a Biography. “No sooner had I done this than my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas. I wrote rapidly till 12.”

A year and two days later, she laid down her pen, having written the date – 11 October 1928 – as the book’s final words.