Jane Seymour at the National Portrait Gallery

I'm responsible for the Tudor portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. What I've recently been involved in the acquisition of is a portrait of Queen Jane Seymour, who was King Henry VIII's third wife. We became aware of a portrait of Jane and on seeing it we were very interested because Jane Seymour was very famously painted by the German artist Hans Holbein the Younger during her time married to Henry VIII. But in terms of paintings of Jane, there aren't actually that many that were painted during her lifetime because she had such a brief window as Queen. The key question that we had to answer was when it might have been painted. Is it something from the 1530s, the 1540s, so during Henry VIII's reign? Or is it a later copy? Because we know from research that we've done at the National Portrait Gallery that there was a market for copies after Holbein's paintings in the late 16th and early 17th century. And so it was that key question of is this a later copy or a contemporary version of a portrait of Jane? What we can see from looking at the back is that it's on a wooden panel and this is very common for paintings in the 16th century. And with oak panels, one of the scientific techniques we can use is to date the tree rings. The analysis showed that actually it looks like the tree was felled in the 1530s during Holbein's lifetime, during Henry VIII's reign. But on first seeing the portrait, it also raised really interesting questions because it had some very unusual qualities that we wouldn't have necessarily expected. And it seemed that the painting was unfinished. Another element that was really clear that we could see in the painting was that the underdrawing was really visible. And the underdrawing that we could see, however, was incredibly casual. You have these wonderful circles around the areas that Jules clearly intended to be at some point. And so, again, you have this brilliant opportunity to see the construction of the painting and the different stages that you go through. But the thing that really caught our attention was this idea of a portrait of Jane Seymour but that had these fascinating research questions and offered the opportunity for insight into the artist's studio in the early 16th century.