WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?
We know what George Washington looked like; we have portraits. We know that Napoleon put his hand in his jacket and sported hair that would look swell on one of today’s club kids. We are familiar with the face of Leonardo da Vinci because of a self-portrait. There are glorious drawings, even photographs, of Charles Dickens. You can view busts of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar and Shakespeare.
But what did Jane Austen look like?
The picture above is a detail from what some believe is the only professional portrait of Jane Austen. She is the iconic writer of such books as Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park. Those books and others eventually became movies and television dramas, making her a world-wide legend with a legion of devoted fans.
But is it a portrait of Jane Austen?
That is our mystery.
So, let us journey together into a precarious opacity that could be described as a lion’s den filled with land mines, angry badgers, hornets’ nests, still more land mines, you and I, and, of course, lions; the latter feeling justly put-upon because their den is now uncomfortably crowded. You see, there are decades-long grudges regarding the provenance of this painting.
Proper British grudges. First, though, permit me to digress.
In this piece, I will ask (and seek to answer) one very narrow and maddening question. The answer to that question, in my mind, is crucial in determining the provenance of this portrait. If you have more time to spend on the entire issue of provenance, I have gone into much greater depth at this link. (There are no advertisements or pop-ups.).
So this, my friends, is what the full portrait looks like:
Beautiful, isn’t she? How old do you think she is?
There, I’ve gone and said it. In order to have been painted by the painter said to have painted the painting, Jane Austen had to have been thirteen or fourteen years old at the time, according to some experts.
I believe the woman looks twenty. My Sister, after some furrowed brow time, guessed twenty-two.
The artist presumed to have rendered this portrait is Ozias Humphry. He was a well-known portraitist of the time, so a lot is discernible about his adventures. For example, he lived in India for many years before coming back to England. By the time Jane Austen turned twenty-two, he was blind.
Perhaps we have painted ourselves into a corner?
The Portrait Provenance
It is claimed that a great uncle, Francis Austen, who was a wealthy man, commissioned the portrait while Jane was about thirteen years of age and while the family was visiting his estate. Frances Austen’s wife was Jane Austen’s Godmother. Through the years, the work has been variously attributed to Johann Zoffany, George Romney and finally, Ozias Humphry.
The portrait passed along that Austen line until it became the property of Colonel Thomas Austen, who would have known Jane the author. From there, it was given as a wedding gift to Elizabeth Harding Newman. When she passed, it devolved to her step-son, the Reverend Doctor Thomas Harding Newman. (For a more detailed account of the claimed provenance, including the relationships between the parties, please click on this link.).
The Reverend intended to will the portrait to a descendant of the iconic writer but never got around to formally executing that desire. His nephew nevertheless gave it to that descendant of Jane Austen, a Mr. Moorland Rice, and it has passed along the Rice family line since then. Because of that, it is called the Rice Portrait.
In the 1930s, it is said that the National Portrait Gallery, London, attempted to purchase the Rice portrait for its collection. In the 1940s, scholars questioned the authenticity of the painting based on the costume. It was alleged that the dress worn by the sitter was not contemporary with the time during which the portrait must have been painted.
The National Gallery no longer showed interest.
The owners requested an export license from the National Gallery, and the portrait was offered for auction by Christie’s in the United States in 2007. It failed to sell. The minimum acceptable bid was not met.
What is Provenance?
Provenance is basically proof of a chain of custody, from the artist’s easel to the first owner to the next and so on until you reach the present owner. This is usually accomplished with contemporary documentation that may take the form of descriptions in auctions, tax and sales receipts, inventories, Art catalogs or other then-current writings. It can also be aided by scientific testing. Experts can study the painting for brushstrokes, signatures and techniques traceable to a particular artist. For example, as you can see, Ozias Humphry had used dramatic (somewhat impressionistic) backgrounds before:
In the end, the provenance of a well-known painting comes down to the opinions of a “jury.” That jury consists of the leading scholars in that particular artistic discipline.
Proofs for and Against Provenance
I have dealt with all of the other proofs for and against the provenance of the Rice Portrait in the off-site material. That would include questions of costume and authorship hinted at above and many others. Suffice it to say that I am prepared to believe that the portrait depicts Jane Austen if I can only get past the question of age.
What we are doing here is retracing my steps, as I tackled the issue of age. Was the sitter too old to be Jane Austen? As problematic as it can sometimes be, I do place a great deal of confidence in first impressions. When I first saw the Rice Portrait, I believed that the young lady depicted was in her twenties.
But then I found a photograph.
The Age of the Sitter
In the Art Quiz diary the other day, I provided a detail showing the face of the Rice portrait. I asked everyone to estimate the age of the young lady. There was a poll. Lunch was served.
You have answered the challenge and estimated the age of the portrait sitter. We made the poll as “blind” and scientific as possible, trying not to skew the results. Here is the status of the poll as of 5:20 am this morning:
I think it is important because my first reaction to the Rice portrait was that the lady (seen on the right below) was in her twenties. Yet, everybody claimed that the sitter, whether they believed that she was Jane Austen or not, was thirteen or fourteen years old.
The photograph of the Rice portrait on the left was taken by a professional photographer in 1883. Do you see a difference? To me, the photograph on the left appears to be that of a young girl, potentially thirteen or fourteen years of age. Compared to the lady of twenty-or-so on the right, the young girl on the left has a thinner neck, a thinner face, more childish features and a slightly unkempt hairstyle. She might even be wearing a pony tail in the back!
The Glamour Makeover
The portrait on the right, on the other hand, looks like an older version of the same female, but one who has also paid to have the “glamour package,” complete with better makeup, airbrushed skin, and a better hair stylist. She looks heavier, more womanly, more like a debutante and less like a tomboy.
How could this be?
My personal theory is that the original painting looked like the photograph on the left. It was the portrait of a child of thirteen or fourteen years. However, one of four things happened to change the sitter’s appearance.
The First of Four Possible Things
It is a fact of life that every masterpiece has been retouched so that what you see in a museum is not exactly what came off of the artist’s easel. Because of deterioration there must be restoration. That is the nature of our world; it decays.
Moreover, we have seen specifically, with images of Jane Austen, an impulse to “pretty up” the appearance of the great writer.
The photograph that you see is the new “Tenner” or ten pound note. Back in July of this year, the Bank of England introduced a plastic ten pound note featuring the likeness of Jane Austen.
But is it?
The fact is that the portrait of Jane Austen on the ten pound note is a romanticized version of a drawing of the author allegedly rendered by her sister, Cassandra Austen. It is great to see this homage paid. It is interesting to note that the Austen Tenner replaced the old one picturing Charles Darwin. That’s exceedingly fine company!
Yet, it is not really a picture of Jane Austen.
The Cassandra drawing looked quite a bit different. This is the drawing that is attributed to Cassandra Austen (left), juxtaposed with the romanticized makeover that formed the basis for the ten pound note:
As you can see, some liberties were taken. As you will see below in American newspaper clippings from the early 1900s, Austenites have always been desperate for images of their heroine. They want to associate a face with that beautiful, snarky mind. If the face, itself, is beautiful, well, all the better.
The first of four possible things I’ve entertained is that the portrait was retouched after the 1883 photograph, giving the hero a more glamorous look.
The Second of Four Possible Things
Sometime shortly before the photo was taken in 1883, an art restorer or perhaps a prior owner—who also happened to have a little skill at painting—touched up the portrait.
Consider that the painting, if it was originally from the late 1700s, was over eighty years old in the 1880s. It would be in need of restoration. Also, consider what people did to the Cassandra drawing of Jane Austen. They repainted it. The owner of the painting right before the 1883 photograph was taken was the Reverend Doctor Thomas Harding Newman. He had declared that he wanted to gift the painting back to the Austen line. He could gift a tattered old painting or one that was bright and fresh-looking. He apparently had the skill to do it.
In this theory, the portrait was “touched up” before the 1883 photograph, but the camera did not pick up the newer, glossier paint. You see, it can take up to fifty years for oil paint to fully set. The camera simply reflected light differently on certain aspects of the painting. One possible reason for that is my conjectured new or glossy paint or varnish, which causes problems for even the best modern, professional photographers:
“Sometimes you can’t see the artwork because of glare and reflections. … Highly textured oil and acrylic paintings with a glossy varnish are especially prone to having severe glare and reflection problems.”
This is a problem that photographers have now, in 2017. There are forums in which experts try to solve the problems. Now, imagine a photographer in 1883, one-hundred and thirty-four years ago.
The Third and Fourth of Four Possible Things
Of course, it could be that the 1883 photograph of the portrait was just poorly done because cameras, at the time, were poorly constructed and not fully understood. Or it could have been operator error. These a very distinct possibilities. However, what are the odds—what kind of coincidence would it be—for the camera to remove the exact elements of the painting that would change a glamorous twenty-year-old debutante into a skinnier, thirteen-year-old tomboy?
It is possible.
My Sister, with her sharp eyes and furrowed brow, noticed that the area at the nape of the neck on the left (our left), seems to be shaded darker. You can see that in the color photograph. The artist wanted to depict a shadow. That, among other things, could be what the camera simply failed to pick up.
What This Could Mean
I found the 1883 photograph in an internet post by Professor Claudia Johnson, a Professor of English at Princeton. She indicated that it was the frontispiece for two books about Austen written by a great-nephew and great-niece of Jane Austen. A frontispiece is an illustration facing the title page of a book. What the owner and those authors had to say about the portrait is interesting.
The owner of the portrait said that the painting was “of a girl of 15.” One great-nephew indicated that the portrait, “if genuine, must be of a girl of 14 or 15.” Another great-nephew called it “a True Bill.” The great-niece asserted that “it is of my great Aunt Jane Austen.”
I believe that this means that we have narrowed down the likeliest occurrence. I don’t believe those great-nephews would have unanimously called the female in the portrait “14 or 15,” unless she looked that age. I suspect the painting was retouched after that.
Facial Recognition Software
Using a facial recognition software program called Rekognition from Amazon Web Services, I sought to compare the Rice portrait with the 1883 photograph. I am not privy to the software’s algorithm, or to knowledge of its weaknesses. I have used it in the past, though, and it has generally succeeded to match faces that should match (with a notable Presidential exception).
Now, that’s surprising. Wow! I was shocked. I don’t doubt that these are photographs of the same portrait, but the facial recognition software sure does. I do see marked differences, and that has apparently shown up in the algorithms. You are more than welcome—in fact I implore you—to repeat this test using the Rekognition software or any other software at your disposal.
Some of you may remember a previous Art Mystery, in which we explored the question of whether great classical masters Robert Campin and Rogier van der Weyden painted the same woman, years apart. I believe that we solved that mystery, in part, thanks to facial recognition software:
As you can see, the Rekognition software found a match. Of course, some of you believed that the ladies could be sisters. That is also a possibility. However, in the case of Jane Austen v. Jane Austen we have two photographs of the same painting—but they don’t match!
A Longing to Know
You can see in the excerpt from a very old newspaper on the right that there was a great deal of interest in Jane Austen in the United States back in 1906, before the advent of movies or television dramas.
Is this a Fan Club?
Back in the old “Indian Territory,” folks gathered to discuss the life and times of Jane Austen. Most importantly for our purposes, you can see that those fans of Austen were desperately interested in what she looked like.
One of the presenters, a Mrs. W. P. Thompson was to offer a “Pen portrait of Jane Austen and characterization.” Was this an actual portrait of the famed Jane Austen? Of course not. It was a “Pen portrait,” and likely a bit of fan fiction. It does tell us two things.
A great curiosity about Jane Austen’s likeness has existed as long as readers have adored her novels. Also, people may have been creating their own “likenesses” of the author based upon what little description existed of her features and what the artist saw in her mind’s eye.
How many “fan fiction” portraits were created that may turn up at a later date to be called potentially true portraits of Jane Austen? As you can see below, the desire to know of the appearance of Jane Austen was on the minds of North Carolinians back in 1902:
This is probably a copy of the 1883 photograph of the Rice portrait. Whenever there’s a void in a potential market, that void gets filled.
Conclusion
Reputations are at stake. “If the portrait is confirmed as being Austen, it may be an embarrassment to the National Portrait Gallery, which granted the picture a license for sale abroad on the basis that it could not be the writer.” The Daily Mail, June 9, 2012. A great fortune can be made or lost depending upon the provenance of this portrait.
Proper British grudges, spanning decades and publicly shared in such discrete locations as the Times Literary Supplement—a periodical which has seen T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Henry James grace its pages—has been the battleground of choice for this conflict, which is truly a World War now.
I believe it is a portrait of the author, Jane Austen. I believe it has been retouched and given the “glamour” makeover treatment, and that that has unfortunately caused some confusion. An art restorer painted everybody into a corner.
I don’t believe that those descendants of the Austen line would have called her a girl of 14 or 15 if they had seen the portrait we are looking at. Again, for a great deal of additional evidence regarding the provenance of the Rice portrait, and questions about it, please see the off-site material.
My theory, whether right or wrong, will not change the minds that have dug into their positions over a span of decades. For now, then, I will sit over here, waiting, patiently waiting, to be attacked by the angry badgers, the lions and perhaps a hornet or two.