This highly significant and extremely rare portrait depicts one of the most powerful and influential English women of the sixteenth century – Queen Katherine Parr (1512–1548), the last of Henry VIII’s six wives. Most likely painted circa 1547-8, shortly after the King’s death when she was Queen Dowager of England and Ireland and overseeing the education of the future Queen Elizabeth I, it is one of only two surviving contemporary, or near contemporary, paintings of Katherine, the other being a related full length of circa 1545 in the National Portrait Gallery, also traditionally attributed to Master John, the first known life-size full-length portrait of an Englishwoman ever commissioned (fig. 1).¹ Both paintings have, at various times in their history, been mistaken for portraits of others, including Queen Mary I and Lady Jane Grey, but the sitter can be securely identified from the distinctive crown topped jewel at her chest, which is recorded in detail in inventories of Queen Katherine’s possessions. Having been erroneously published by Roy Strong in 1969 as ‘destroyed by fire’, the reappearance of this exceptional painting on the market now, almost 200 years since it was last offered at auction, signifies a major opportunity to reassess the only contemporary painting of Queen Katherine remaining in private hands.

A highly educated woman with wide-ranging intellectual, cultural, literary and religious interests, who was herself the first known Englishwoman to publish a work of prose in the sixteenth century, Katherine Parr has hitherto remained an enigmatic figure on the pages of British history. Her significance as a singularly important player in the power politics of the latter years of Henry VIII’s reign, as well as the importance of her wide ranging patronage of religious and educational reform, however, have recently been brought to wider attention, most notably in the newly released film Firebrand, starring Jude Law and Alicia Vikander, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May this year, an adaptation of the 2013 novel Queen’s Gambit by Elizabeth Freemantle. Together they have helped bring to the fore the life of one of England’s most significant yet misunderstood female figures of the Tudor era. Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, SURVIVED.

The Sitter

Born in 1512, Katherine was the daughter of Sir Thomas Parr (1478–1517), of Kendal in Westmorland, and his wife Maud (1492–1531), daughter of Sir Thomas Green of Greens Norton, Northamptonshire. Katherine’s father died when she was just five years old and her guardianship and education were left in the hands of her mother, who had been a lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon (after whom she named her daughter). Maud Parr was an independent, capable and highly articulate woman who set an example of female independence and education that would have a lifelong effect on her daughter, and through her on Katherine’s stepdaughter, Elizabeth Tudor – the future Queen Elizabeth I. Katherine’s unusually rich childhood education stimulated an interest in scholarship from an early age. Her interest in medicine is well-documented. By the time she reached maturity she was fluent in Latin, French and Italian, and whilst Queen she undertook the study of Spanish. It was probably her early education which also fostered her interest in numismatics, and by the time of her death she had amassed a large collection of antique and foreign coins.

Having been married twice already; firstly to a Lincolnshire gentleman, Sir Edward Burgh (1529–33); and secondly to John Neville, 3rd Baron Latimer of Snape Castle, Yorkshire (1534–43); Katherine first came to the notice of the King in 1543, having secured herself a position in the household of Princess Mary, as one of her ladies. Twentieth century depictions of Katherine have tended to portray her as a plain-faced, pious widow selected by the King for her talents as a nurse. However, this image is misleading and does not hold up to the weight of contemporary evidence. Henry had a finely developed eye for beauty and Katherine, with her red hair and grey eyes, was a graceful dancer and witty conversationalist with a lively personality. As this portrait shows, she shared the King’s love of fine clothes and jewels, particularly diamonds, but she also had a deep interest in the arts, as well as being an erudite scholar who read Petrarch and Erasmus for enjoyment. Katherine also conveyed a sense of her own value, independent of her marital relationships, which was rare in a woman of this period, demonstrated by the fact that, even as Queen, her signature invariably included the initials of her maiden name: ‘KP’.

Katherine married Henry VIII at Hampton Court in July 1543, becoming his sixth wife and the only one without either Royal background or previous court service. Among her first acts after becoming Queen was to secure the friendship of Henry’s children. Already on good terms with her former mistress, Princess Mary, she soon befriended Princess Elizabeth and Edward, the young Prince of Wales, both of whom were of a scholarly bent and found a kindred spirit in their new stepmother. In particular, Katherine took a keen personal interest in her stepchildren’s education. Prince Edward wrote frequently to her regarding his progress at his studies and it is testament to the closeness of their relationship that, of the five letters Elizabeth wrote before the age of sixteen that survive, all are either to or about Katherine. Her success in this regard would have lasting consequences for English politics, since Katherine used her growing influence with the King to persuade him to include both Mary and Elizabeth in the line of succession, thereby validating both their subsequent future rules.

During the summer of 1544, when Henry led a military expedition to France, the King appointed Katherine as Queen Regent in his absence, together with a regency council dominated by the Queen’s supporters. Katherine made every effort not just to preside over the regency council, but to rule in the King’s name, exercising enormous power. She signed a number of royal proclamations and skilfully managed the complex political situation in England, including unstable conditions along the Scottish border. Her capable stewardship earned her the King’s approval. The assumption of so much power, however, as her biographer Susan James put it: ‘not merely by a woman, but by a woman who only a year before had been a Yorkshire housewife’,² made the Queen enemies at court. Combined with her increasingly evangelical beliefs, which particularly alienated religious conservatives, a plot arose against her which, although she survived it, resulted in her playing a far more subdued role during the final months before Henry’s death in January 1547.

With the income from numerous dower manors inherited through her first two marriages and an extensive package of lands and manors in the southern shires and London – once the dowry of Catherine Howard – Katherine had a considerable private income. Added to this, shortly before his death the King had made provision in his will for her to receive an annual allowance of £7,000 (about £3.5 million in today’s money) and further ordered that, though a Queen Dowager, she should be given the respect of a Queen of England. With such significant resources, ‘Katherine probably involved herself in more aspects of the English Renaissance and Reformation than any other of Henry’s queens’.³ A great patron of the arts, she had a passion for gardens, which she exercised at Greenwich and at her estates in Chelsea; loved music, taking the Bassano family of court musicians into her household; and instinctively grasped the power of the increasingly popular iconographic medium of secular portraiture, particularly in reinforcing the royal position of her stepchildren. She employed the Flemish miniature painters Susanna Horenbout and Levina Teerlinc (the former being the first known female artist to have worked in England) and patronised all the chief portrait painters of the day, including John Bettes, Lucas Horenbout (brother of Susanna), William Scrots and Master John. It was at her behest that the earliest portraits of Prince Edward were painted, and she also commissioned the first life-size portraits of both Mary and Elizabeth. She maintained her own acting troupe and patronised playwrights; helped promote the art of book binding in England; and commissioned Thomas Berthelet, the King’s printer, helping to advance the publication of reformed religious literature. Furthermore, her interest in architecture is evidenced in the splendid new apartments that she commissioned for herself at Hampton Court.

Katherine’s intellectual and scholastic patronage was equally extensive. In 1546 she was instrumental in the foundation of Trinity College, Cambridge and she took an active interest in educational and religious reform. Not just a patron, however, Katherine was a scholar in her own right, working closely with Archbishop Thomas Cranmer on the publication of the King’s Primer, which contained Cranmer’s Litany and Katherine’s own translation of Bishop Fisher’s Psalms or Prayers Taken out of Holy Scripture. Her first efforts as a writer herself, however, appeared the year before with her English translation of Bishop Fisher’s Psalmi seu precationes, published anonymously in 1544; but in 1545 she issued her Prayers or Meditations in her own name, becoming the first work ever published by an Englishwoman (let alone a queen) under her own name. In 1547, following the King’s death and at about the time this portrait was likely painted, Katherine published her most significant literary contribution, The Lamentation of a Sinner, and she is also credited with an English translation of the work of Savonarola.

Shortly after Henry VIII died, Katherine rekindled her clandestine romance with Sir Thomas Seymour, one of the most dashing bachelors of the Tudor court and the new King’s uncle, which had begun in in 1542–3 and was renewed in 1547. However, the relationship received strong opposition from Thomas’s brother, the new Lord Protector, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, and the couple were married in secret sometime in May 1547 within weeks of Henry’s death. This impetuous action exasperated a series of bitter public and private quarrels between the Seymour brothers and alienated Katherine from her stepson, Edward VI. Despite this, she managed to secure the guardianship of Princess Elizabeth whilst her husband acquired the wardship of Lady Jane Grey. It is in this context, shortly after Henry’s death, with Katherine wearing black in official mourning, in the febrile political atmosphere of the new regency, that this portrait was likely painted. As such it can be seen as an affirmation of her power and status, and a statement of her regal dignity, asserting her position (as Henry had intended) as a Queen of England.

Katherine’s jewellery, as seen in this painting, is significant in this regard. Under the terms of Henry VIII’s will she was entitled to the jewellery of the Queen of England and Katherine continued to dress and style herself as such after his death. The Queen’s jewels became the subject of an acrimonious dispute, however, with her brother-in-law, the Lord Protector, who locked them in the Tower and refused to return them to her, claiming them as the property of the Crown. Katherine was never to regain possession of them, before she died in childbirth eighteen months later, on 7 September 1548, at her husband’s estate at Sudeley Castle.

The Portrait

The Jersey portrait is one of only two surviving contemporary portraits of Queen Katherine Parr, the other being the slightly earlier, related full-length in the National Portrait Gallery previously mentioned. In both, the Queen’s jewellery is of further significance in identifying the sitter. In the 1960s both paintings were identified as likenesses of Lady Jane Grey by Strong, largely on the basis of comparison with an engraving in Henry Holland’s Herwologia Anglica of 1620, and a portrait at Seaton Delaval – which appears to be a derivation of the present work, on canvas, dating to the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and erroneously called ‘Lady Jane’.⁴ Throughout the nineteenth century and until Strong’s publication, the Jersey portrait was in fact also erroneously identified as Queen Mary I. Both portraits were correctly reidentified in 1996 by Susan James (see Literature) on account of the jewellery the sitter is shown wearing, specifically the distinctive crown-headed brooch which appears on her bodice (fig. 2). This brooch, which may have been made for Katherine by her favourite goldsmith, the Dutch jeweller Peter Richardson, is traceable through three Tudor lists of jewels dating to before, during, and after Katherine’s time as Queen, one of which is entitled: ‘The Quene’s Jewells in a cofer having written upon it, “the Quene’s Juelles”’ [sic], and for all of which there is good evidence pointing to Katherine Parr’s ownership (the earliest list of 1542 is an inventory of the jewels belonging to Catherine Howard, which subsequently passed to her successor).⁵

The last list, from 1550, describes the brooch as ‘one ouche or flower with a crown containing two diamonds, one ruby, one emerald; the crown being garnished with diamonds, three pearls pendant.’⁶ Interestingly, overpaint in the full-length portrait at the National Portrait Gallery now means that the square-cut emerald there appears red, but the brooch’s true character is plainly obvious in the present painting, where all the precious stones are clearly distinguished from one another. The accuracy of the depiction of the brooch – thus underlining the portrait’s royal status and sovereignty of the sitter – is further corroborated by its description in the jewel list of Elizabeth I, to whom the brooch passed with the rest of the royal jewellery in 1587, which specifies that the crown is ‘garnished with XV small diamonds’⁷ – all fifteen stones are clearly discernible here. At Elizabeth’s death the brooch passed to Anne of Denmark, queen of James I; it is found in her jewellery inventory of 1606, but an annotation recounts that in 1609, having lost the two triangular-cut diamonds, the brooch was broken up for ‘the making of Gold plate’.⁸

In the full-length portrait, and in a slightly later half-length portrait from the late sixteenth century, previously attributed to William Scrots (also in the National Portrait Gallery; fig. 3),⁹ Katherine wears a pendant – probably another brooch adapted to be worn on a necklace – which may be identified as that described in the 1542 list of Catherine Howard’s jewels: ‘oone other Ooche of Golde wherein is averey feir large ruby and a rounde diamond with a verey feir peerle hangyng at the same [sic].’¹⁰ The pendant in the present portrait, by contrast, would appear also to include an emerald; nor does the sitter wear the girdle of antique cameos that appears in the full-length painting, and which is also identifiable in the 1542 list. Instead, here Katherine’s waist is encircled by a belt of large pearls and diamonds in gold settings, with pomanders and small antique urn-shaped pendants, which, together with the matching adornment to the line of her bodice across the chest and the pattern of her necklace, bears a remarkable similarity to that in a portrait of Elizabeth I, when Princess, in the Royal Collection, at Windsor.¹¹ The portrait of Princess Elizabeth and the Jersey portrait of Katherine also share similar embroidery in the sleeves and both sitters wear almost identical diamond rings, which display the latest styles in diamond cutting – the table-cut and pointed cut – which were symbolic of fidelity, though the pattern of their display follows that in the the portrait of Katherine in the National Portrait Gallery. Unlike either of these other two portraits, however, the jewels in Katherine’s cuffs, and the pomanders on her girdle, in the Jersey portrait are all inscribed multiple times with the words ‘LAVS DEVS’ (‘praise God’).

The Artist

This portrait has long been associated with an unknown painter referred to as ‘Master John', on account of its relationship to the full-length portrait of Katherine in the National Portrait Gallery. That painting shares stylistic similarities to a portrait on panel of Mary I, when Princess, dated 1544, which is also in the National Portrait Gallery,¹² and is presumed to be that mentioned in Mary’s expenses of that year: ‘Item, pd to one John that drue her grace in a table’.¹³ Recent technical analysis also points to the two National Portrait Gallery paintings as being by the same hand.¹⁴

Although the present painting would appear to follow more or less the same type and pattern as the National Portrait Gallery full-length portrait, the format, Katherine’s slight turn to the left, as well as her costume and jewellery – as mentioned above – bear much closer comparison, both in composition and handling, with the portrait of the young Princess Elizabeth in the Royal Collection. That painting, together with a related portrait of Edward VI, also in the Royal Collection,¹⁵ which is effectively regarded as a pendant and is certainly by the same hand, dates to circa 1546 and both are mentioned in an inventory of Edward VI’s collection in 1547 at Whitehall. These paintings are believed to be by a Flemish artist, most probably William Scrots, who was employed by the English Crown from 1545–53, receiving an annual salary of £62–10s., a greater sum than any painter – including Holbein – had ever received before. There is also some documentary evidence that Scrots was working on a portrait of Katherine Parr in 1545, however no surviving painting can be securely linked with this record.¹⁶

Little is known of Scrots as an artistic personality and only a couple of paintings are attributed to him with any certainty (including the famous anamorphic portrait of Edward VI in the National Portrait Gallery, which does not lend itself to attributional comparison).¹⁷ In terms of technique, however, the rendering of the costume here – particularly in comparing Elizabeth’s undersleeves with those of Katherine in the present portrait – is strikingly similar to that in the Royal Collection portraits. The fabric is painted in minute detail, using flecks of paint to create the effect of metallic thread, rather than using silver or gold leaf, as in the National Portrait Gallery works. Given the strong relationship that Katherine had with both children, some sort of connection between all three of these portraits and their commission is highly plausible.

Owing to the deficit of archival material, and often only partial annotations in inventories or wills (as in the case of ‘John’), the identity of painters from this period is invariably uncertain, since signatures are also scarce – the notion of the painter as a creative individual, rather than a craftsman, being still in its infancy. The high quality and size of this painting, however – along with the results of dendrochronological analysis, which indicate a probable execution date within the last year or so of Katherine’s life – indubitably connect this portrait with the full-length in the National Portrait Gallery, traditionally associated with the unknown Master John, as well with the related portrait of Princess Elizabeth in the Royal Collection. It is perfectly possible, however, that multiple, interconnected hands participated in the production of all three.

Technical analysis

Dendrochronological analysis carried out by Ian Tyers has revealed that this panel is made up of three boards from at least two different straight gained oak trees from the eastern Baltic.¹⁸ The last ring present in the panel, from 1542, indicates that the boards were derived from trees that were felled from after circa 1546 and before circa 1576. Oak panels that were shipped from the Baltic were used rapidly after felling, as the wood was particularly resistant to warping, and therefore required less time for seasoning. This dating thus leaves open the very real possibility that this portrait may have been executed in the last year or so of Katherine’s life – a hypothesis supported by the fact that this would also date the painting to the aftermath of Henry VIII’s death, and Katherine is shown here wearing black, perhaps in mourning, in contrast to the richly embroidered, gold, silver and red gown of high fashion that she wears in the full-length portrait. It is also the case that demand for portraits of the queen would have waned dramatically following her death. None of the boards derives from the same trees as those used in the National Portrait Gallery full-length portrait of Katherine Parr, nor the portraits of Edward and Elizabeth, which do have a number of boards in common with each other.¹⁹ It is possible that this portrait may once have been three-quarter or even full-length, but any evidence of this has disappeared with the thinning of the panel and consequent loss of any original bevelling along the edges.

Infrared reflectography carried out by Tager Stonor Richardson reveals extensive underdrawing with a dry, carbon-based medium, some of which is visible to the naked eye beneath the paint in Katherine’s face, which has become more translucent with time, despite the old and discoloured varnish (fig. 4).²⁰ The infrared imaging clearly indicates that the face and bust, including the jewellery, are based on a transferred pattern. The drawn lines are hard and discontinuous, sometimes overlapping, which suggest possible reinforcement of a pre-existing design, with no indication of modelling, also typical of a transferred drawing. The hands, brocade, and lace work, by contrast, are set down in a liquid paint, which probably means they were not part of the cartoon; there are also numerous small shifts apparent in the painted patterns of the costume. Infrared imaging of the full-length portrait of Katherine reveals much more loosely handled, freehand drawing, which is not necessarily closely followed in the paint, although this is in contrast to the underdrawing found in Master John’s portrait of Mary, which is much more static, and appears to derive from a pounced transfer.²¹ Technical imaging carried out on Scrots’ paintings also show a variety of underdrawing techniques, from free carbon drawing to transfers. The underdrawing identified in John Bettes’ portrait at Tate is particularly free.²²

The infrared imaging of the present portrait also shows that the sitter’s hands and the forms of the jewellery set against the dress – the girdle, the brooch, and the neckline – were carefully reserved, while the costume was evidently painted first, reflecting the practised and systematic approach of an experienced artist. Such a working process is entirely commensurate with portraiture of the time, when a likeness may have been taken from a single sitting and was subsequently used to create multiple versions of the same portrait, possibly over quite some period of time, with differences – in costume or jewellery, for example – introduced with each iteration (see, for example, Hans Eworth’s portraits of Mary I).²³ It seems quite possible that the pattern used for the present work may ultimately have been based on the finished full-length portrait in the National Portrait Gallery.

Note on Provenance

The earliest provenance of this portrait remains unknown, although a ‘picture of queen Katherine dowager’ is listed in the collection of her sister, Anne Parr, Countess of Pembroke, in 1561, at Baynard’s Castle.²⁴ The first recorded owner of certainty is John Dent, who became a partner, like his father, at Child’s Bank in 1805. He served as a Member of Parliament for Lancaster and Poole; was a noted Freemason, serving as Grand Treasurer of the United Grand Lodge of England; a Fellow of the Royal Society; and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries. Above all, however, he was a bibliophile and was one of the founding members of the Roxburghe Club. A series of sales of his library was held between March and May 1827, during which time this portrait was also sold, eventually coming into the possession of Thomas Baylis, a noted antiquary and collector of Tudor and Elizabethan furniture who lived at Pryor’s Bank in Fulham.

At the sale of Baylis’ collection the painting was bought by the 2nd Duke of Buckingham for his celebrated collection at Stowe House. Following the Duke’s sensational bankruptcy seven years later, the contents of Stowe were sold in one of the most prominent English county house auctions of all time, where this painting was bought by the Countess of Jersey. It hung at the Jersey’s principal seat, Middleton Park in Oxfordshire, where Sir George Scharf, the first director of the National Portrait Gallery, sketched it in his notebook during his visit in May 1861 (fig. 5). The painting subsequently went to Osterley Park, just west of London – the other seat of the Earls of Jersey. When the 9th Earl of Jersey, George Child Villiers, donated Osterley House and Park to the British Nation in 1949 he stored many of the valuable works of art in a warehouse on the Isle of Jersey; the storage facility was targeted in a series of random arson attacks on the island that year, resulting in a huge loss of the Earl’s property. This picture was presumed to be among the objects destroyed by fire but was in fact fortunately safe at Radier Manor.

The frame, which bears a plaque identifying the sitter as Mary and with an attribution to Holbein, probably affixed either when the painting was at Stowe in the Buckingham collection, is most likely nineteenth-century. The crest at the top, bearing the name 'Queen Mary', is now missing its crown, which is visible in an old black-and-white photograph of the painting. Royal trophy frames topped with crowns, such as this, became popular during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, retrospectively used to surround often much older royal portraits. The profile and architectural ornament of the basic structure of the frame are copied from British panel frames of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, with additional ornaments of festoons of flowers, and variations on roses at each corner.

We are very grateful to Lynn Roberts, of The Frame Blog, for her invaluable insights into this frame; to read more about its history, please click here.

¹ Oil on panel, 180.3 x 94 cm., inv. no. NPG 4451.
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitConservation/mw01957/Katherine-Parr
² S. James, ‘Katherine Parr’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online, January 2012.
³ James, ‘Katherine Parr’, 2012.
⁴ Oil on canvas, 98 x 67 cm., inv. no. NT 1276906; https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/1276906
⁵ For a full discussion of these lists, see James 1996, pp. 21–22.
⁶ BL, MS Add. 46,348, fol. 168a; cited in James 1996, p. 22. An ‘ouche’ was a brooch worn pinned to the bodice.
⁷ BL, MS Royal, App 68svm fol. 26; cited in James 1996, p. 23.
⁸ Cited in D. Scarisbrick, ‘Anne of Denmark’s Jewellery Inventory’, in Archaeologia, vol. CIX, 1991, p. 210.
⁹ Oil on panel, 63.5 x 50.8 cm., inv. no. NPG 4618; https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw01147/Katherine-Parr
¹⁰ BL, MS Stowe 559, fol. 58b; cited in N. Tallis, All the Queen’s Jewels 1445-1548. Power, Majesty and Display, Oxford and New York 2023, p. 135.
¹¹ Oil on panel, 108.5 x 81.8 cm., inv. no. RCIN 404444; https://www.rct.uk/collection/404444/elizabeth-i-when-a-princess
¹² Oil on panel, 71.1 x 50.8 cm., inv. no. NPG 428; https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitConservation/mw04264/Queen-Mary-I
¹³ Privy purse expenses of Princess Mary, F. Madden (ed.), London 1831, p. 168.
¹⁴ Both share an extensive use of silver and gold leaf in the dresses of the sitters, along with complex layering of oil paint and glazes, and dense azurite in the background. For further discussion, see the Making art in Tudor Britain research database, NPG online: https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/research/programmes/making-art-in-tudor-britain/matbsearch.php ; and T. Cooper, A. Burnstock, M. Howard and E. Town (eds), Painting in Britain 1500–1630. Production, influences and patronage, Oxford 2015, particularly pp. 38–45, nos 3 and 4.
¹⁵ Oil on panel, 107.2 x 82 cm., inv. no. RCIN 404441; https://www.rct.uk/collection/404441/edward-vi-1537-53
¹⁶ See W. Sessions, ‘The Earl of Surrey and Catherine Parr: A letter and two portraits’, in ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, vol. 5, 2–3, April–July 1992, pp. 128–30: an entry in the records of Edward VI’s privy purse on 5 March 1551 refers to payment to ‘gwillm Stret the k. painter […] for recompense of iij great tables made by the sayd Gwillm’ – the only portrait specified is one of ‘the late earle of Surrey’. A letter of 1545, sent to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, references a delay to his portrait, due to the artist still being engaged in painting the Queen’s portrait: ‘Yowre [pi]kt[ur]es be nothynge in a redinesse for that hys delegens ys ssiche wt [the Qu…s] grace’. Previously it has been suggested that a half-length portrait in the National Portrait Gallery (inv. no. 4618), might be the portrait referred to, however this has now proven to be late sixteenth century at the earliest and not attributable to Scrots.
¹⁷ Oil on panel, 42.5 x 160 cm., inv. no. NPG 1299; https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw02032/King-Edward-VI
¹⁸ Dendrochronological Consultancy Report 1462, April 2023 (a copy is available upon request).
¹⁹ NPG 4451 dendrochronologically analysed by Ian Tyers, 2007; RCIN 404444 and RCIN 404441 dendrochronologically analysed by Ian Tyers, 2013.
²⁰ Tager Stonor Richardson Report 20230412, April 2023 (a copy is available upon request).
²¹ Cooper, Burnstock, Howard and Town 2015, pp. 38–45, nos 3 and 4.
²² R. Jones and J.H. Townsend, ‘An unknown man in a black cap 1545 by John Bettes’: https://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/tudor-stuart-technical-research/entries/unknown-man-black-cap-1545
²³ The prototype is understood to be that in the National Portrait Gallery, London; oil on panel, 21.6 x 16.9 cm., inv. no. NPG 4861; https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitConservation/mw04265/Queen-Mary-I?
²⁴ Cited in S.E. James, The Feminine Dynamic in English Art: 1485–1603: Women as Consumers, Patrons and Painters, Aldershot 2009, p. 30 n. 89.