Bessie Blount: AI Recreated Portraits of Henry VIII's Mistress and Henry Fitzroy's Mother

Can we recreate History’s Missing Portraits using AI?
Hello Everyone, Welcome to our series on History’s Missing Portraits.
Do you believe that Bessie Blount, Henry VIII’s mistress, was more beautiful than Anne Boleyn?
However, we could not make such a comparison previously because we do not have a known and confirmed portrait of Bessie Blount.
We do not have vivid portraits of many famous historical figures. Many of them died too young or never had the opportunity to sit for a detailed picture of themselves to be created.
We want to use some new approaches to recreate these missing portraits with the help of artificial intelligence.
In cases where we have reliable sources or detailed paintings of the families and relatives of these famous historical figures, we can use artificial intelligence to reimagine how they will look.
We hope you will enjoy this series. This first video is on recreating the portraits of Elizabeth “Bessie” Blount (1498-1540), Henry VIII’s Mistress and the Mother of Henry Fitzroy.

Chapters:
00:00 History’s Missing Portraits – the Case of Bessie Blount
00:45 Was Bessie Blount more beautiful than Anne Boleyn?
01:40 Bessie’s parents – The Progenitor Model
02:34 Henry Fitzroy – Inheritor’s Resemblance Model
03:14 Combining the Avatars from the Two Models
04:00 Creating Bessie Blount’s Tudor Portraits
04:50 Meeting History

1. Elizabeth “Bessie” Blount (1498-1540)
The video documents our process to recreate history’s missing portraits of Bessie Blount, Henry VIII’s mistress and the mother of Henry Fitzroy.
Despite the acknowledged status and dukedom of Henry Fitzroy, Bessie Blount had no portraits.
Further, no portraits were made for her in her two later marriages with Gilbert Tailboys and Edward Clinton.
In fact, out of her seven children, we only have one Lucas Horenbout portrait for Henry Fitzroy.
We have no known pictures of her other six children from her marriages to Gilbert Tailboys and Edward Clinton.
We are fascinated by the fact that her portraits were missing, especially given her known beauty.
A Tudor palace chaplain once remarked that Bessie was more beautiful than the beautiful Anne Boleyn. In this video, we used artificial intelligence to create a portrait of Bessie Blount.
Let us create the portraits for Bessie and see whether such rumours were true.

2. The Progenitor AI Model: Predicting Bessie’s look from her parent’s effigy
Fortunately, we also have the stone effigy of her parents on their tomb, which we can use to create their AI models.
The Tomb of Sir John Blount and Catherine is in the St John the Baptist Church in Kinlet.
Sir John Blount was a politician, served as a Justice of the Peace for Staffordshire, and accompanied King Henry VIII when he campaigned against Louis XII of France in 1513.
Catherine Pershall, Bessie’s mother, was the daughter and coheiress of Hugh Peshall of Knightley.
John and Catherine had three sons and five daughters; Bessie was the most famous.
Using our Progenitor’s AI Predictions, we used the AI models for Sir John Blount and Catherine Pershall to predict the possible look for Bessie Blount.
This resultant AI model is our first prediction for how Bessie Blount might look if we can bring her back to life.

3. How might she look if Henry Fitzroy resembled Bessie?
To obtain a more accurate prediction for Bessie, we also used our Inheritor’s resemblance model as we have the Horenbout portrait for Henry Fitzroy.
We first used the Horenbout portrait to create an AI avatar for Henry Fitzroy.
Using Henry Fitzroy’s avatar, we created an avatar for Bessie, assuming that Henry Fitzroy resembled Bessie Blount.
Based on our comparisons test, this recreated AI avatar for Bessie Blount has an 83% resemblance to Henry Fitzroy’s portrait.
The Inheritor’s resemblance model enables us to make a second prediction for how Bessie might look.

4. Combining the two AI Avatars from progenitors and inheritors
Although there were numerous similarities, we can also see apparent differences in the two different avatars based on her progenitors and her Inheritor.
By combining these two avatars, we should be able to create our best guess of how Bessie Blount might look if we bring her back to life.
The result was stunning.
This beautiful Bessie Blount avatar can compete against Anne Boleyn for her beauty and put some truth to the Tudor palace rumours.

5. Recreating Tudor Portraits for Bessie Blount
Using our combined avatar, we recreated different portraits for Bessie Blount.
The first portrait allows us to compare her to the Anne Boleyn Portrait at Hever Castle.
The second portrait follows Hans Holbein’s Sketch of her second husband, Edward Clinton.
The third portrait adds her to the Lucas Horenbout miniature of Henry Fitzroy.

The Music is No. 10 New Beginning by Esther Abrami

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