poliphilo

It is pretty...

npr mentioned this on their broadcast this morning.

Why do we have to know what she looked like, when her books speak volumes about her?

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Well quite. It isn't important.

All the same I think we're all a bit inquisitive. I know I am.

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sina-says.livejournal.com

i listened to that same npr broadcast this morning on my way to work.

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I've often thought that Ms. Austen was probably like the little brown wren - or the wise old owl who sat in the oak (the more she heard the less she spoke). I don't understand why people need someone intelligent to also be beautiful.

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Me neither.

But it would be nice to have a good likeness. The only completely authentic portrait is the sketch by her sister cassandra- which is amateurish and- according to those who knew Jane- not particularly accurate

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karenkay.livejournal.com

It looks like one of those paintings where they put a head on a pre-painted body. They are disproportionate, kind of like an ukiyoe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukiyoe).

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You're probably right. Head and body don't seem to match.

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sorenr.livejournal.com

The dress seems rather too empire for a teenage Jane Austen in my humble opinion, Though I suppose this might be accounted for by my rather schetchy knowledge of fashion in the late 18th Century...

But again; who cares? I always imagine Jane Austen looking rather like Emma Thompson, and that image is really quite, quite satisfactory to me.

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isn't that funny? I always think of Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen as looking alike. Right in the same mix as Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Maybe because they all died LONG before I was ever born, I don't know.

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Of course we have photographs of Dickinson and Browning.

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I know. I live in my head, you know. And all of those women look alike in my head.

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Did you know there are now two photographs of Dickinson? The second- which is still disputed- turned up recently on eBay.

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"The dress seems rather too empire for a teenage Jane Austen"

That's what some of the scholars say- but others disagree. Apparently we know very little about what late 18th century children wore.

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idahoswede.livejournal.com

Dress is definitely later period, and were her family wealthy enough for a full-length portrait? I know she had good connections, but don't know about the finances.

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The tradition is that the portrait was commissioned by Jane's wealthy uncle- so no problems there.

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athenais.livejournal.com

But Idahoswede is right, it's totally wrong for the 1780s. The waistline was still close to the natural waist until about 1800.

Lovely portrait, but it isn't likely Jane Austen.

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I think there's a suggestion that it may be another Jane Austen- a niece or something.

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akirlu.livejournal.com

I'm seeing Ackerman plates with pretty high waists back into the mid-1790s in The Gallery of Fashion but the silhouette's still wrong -- bell-like rather than columnar. On the other hand, "Les Merveilleuses et Incroyables" in the 1790s section here is tantalizing -- the problem is, the dating is so imprecise as to be unhelpful. Anyway, it's still not the 1780s.

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shullie.livejournal.com

I love the portrayal of her in the recent film 'Becoming Jane',

http://www.bvimovies.com/uk/becoming_jane/

though now when I read her, I see her in the image of the actress Anne Hatherway :)

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Anne Hathaway has mentioned any number of times how much she enjoys that role.

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I haven't seen it.

Descriptions by people who knew her contain phrases such as "pretty", "round-faced" and "doll-like".

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akirlu.livejournal.com

I don't think I've seen adult fashions that look like that dating earlier than the mid 1790s, and in general, children's fashions are likely to have looked like smaller versions of adult fashions. So, on the whole, to me it seems highly unlikely that it's Jane Austen unless it's Jane Austen in 1795 or later.

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I don't know enough about costume to be anything but agnostic. :)

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oakmouse

Sadly, it doesn't pass muster with my inner art historian. (Although I don't work in the field, that's what my BFA is in, and I know a decent bit about clothing from that era.) The dress is decidedly not 1780s. We do in fact know something about clothing worn by girls during that period (we have a number of surviving portraits, for one thing), and a gown comparable to those worn by adults a decade later isn't really in the running unless Jane herself had a Tardis and could hop ahead for a look at what she'd be wearing to the local Assemblies once she was "out". ;)

The disproportion of head and body, BTW, isn't uncommon for portraiture of that period. It's usually seen in portraits done by the class of painter who travelled around the countryside painting the wives and children of local gentry (as opposed to the luminaries who had regular studios), and you find it in both Britain and America. Sometimes it comes from the head being added to a prepainted body, but when as here it's accompanied by other distortions of form (notice how short her upper torso appears to be) it's more likely to be the result of the painter's lack of skill or practice at portraying human anatomy.

Myself, I'd want to see the provenance of the picture itself. Oral tradition is notoriously iffy, and we already have some discredited tales from that source relating to Jane. ("The prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly", for instance.)

It's a sweet face, though, and altogether a rather endearing picture. I can understand wanting it to be Jane!

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I don't think the provenance is in question. It has a well-documented history within the Austen family. The problem is it only got identified as "great aunt Jane" in the late 19th century. Before that there's just oral tradition. So, it's not a fake, but it could well be a misidentification. Jane was a family name and there's a possibility that this is another, later Jane Austen.

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oakmouse

I wasn't thinking fake, I was thinking how much evidence do we have that the painting was in existence by, say, 1790? Scraps of evidence from family papers or similar sources might provide a clue or two. I don't doubt the painting has been in the family for yonks and is genuinely old, I was simply thinking in terms of possible sources of data. (IIRC the Biography mentions nothing of a surviving portrait, and one would think that had the portrait been thought to be Jane as of that period, it would have occasioned a reference. Especially given the deep affection with which her nephew referred to the remaining memories of his beloved aunt.)

Has anyone looked into whether it might have been a portrait painted of a later Jane in what was intended to be the guise of her famous aunt? It's the sort of silly sentimentality the Victorians would have relished. The anomaly of the gown might be due to the painting having been made long enough after the Empire fashions went out that the painter got the details wrong. That's a very common problem in retrospective paintings.

On the other hand, of course, we're all merely speculating. It's rather fun but we might well be full of hot air. *grin*

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The idea of it being a sort of homage to Jane is delightful.

I don't believe there's any documentary evidence to prove that the picture existed in 1790. It's attributed to a known painter- Ozias Humphrey- with established dates- on the basis of a signature that was there once but disappeared when the painting was too vigorously cleaned at some time in the past (or so they say).

The painting was first published in the 1880s and was accepted as authentic- and as the best representation of Jane- for 40 or 50 years. Then someone raised doubts about the dress and it pretty much dropped out of sight until now.

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The thought I had, as a re-enactor of this period... was also Victorian touches about this rather than it being correct for the 1780s (or even correct for the 1800s)!

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oakmouse

It doesn't seem quite right to me either, but it's been long enough since I studied costume from that era that I can't quite put a finger on anything other than the obviously wrong waist and the fact that the skirt doesn't drape correctly.

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We already have a picture of Austen, done by her sister Cassandra. It's pretty but doesn't show her face and it's definitely a family sketch rather than a great work of art kinda thing...

There are things about the gown and what we know of Austen's taste in clothing (see below) that just feel *wrong* about this, especially if it were supposedly completed around 1780. But there's a certain amount that could be down to the artist - things like the sleeve edge bands being too wide and the sleeves sitting too low on the arm. It would take me ages to explain more, so I won't bore anyone. Brief answer is this doesn't add up as a portrait completed around 1780.

We also know that the adult Austen liked to use colour and pattern in her clothing (because of clothing of hers in costume museum collections and her letters to family about things she was going to wear for particular events) so there is something odd about her being dressed in plain white, even for a formal portrait.

Perhaps there was a portrait commissioned and this is her likeness, but perhaps there was some 'retouching' done later for the sake of a fashionable appearance? That might explain those awful sleeves...

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I'm intrigued by the idea that this might have been retouched to bring the costume up to date- or into conformity with someone's idea of what Jane should have been wearing.

I don't think we can put to much weight on Jane's own taste in clothes. This is after all a portrait of a child and I imagine teenagers in the 1780s pretty much wore what Mama told them to wear.

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Judging the time by our contemporary views of childhood would be wrong.

Personal taste in clothes being a factor depends a lot on the age of the child in question. From their mid teens when girls and boys were 'out' in Society, they wore what *they* chose to wear, rather than having clothes their parents or family chose for them.

Girls also were in the habit of making and trimming their own clothing and even if from well-off families and they would have had a hand in choosing the fabric and trim for their garments. It wasn't all done by servants or trade.

With a climate of increasing town-based living and socialising during Austen's lifetime, girls learned about fashion and taste within the home and from the family's contacts before going out into Society so there would be some familial influence, but not in the way you imagine (in my experience).

Such things were considered as accomplishments and not 'beneath' a lady of the middle class or above :-) Though of course specialist dressmakers would create garments that required fitting, such as stays (corsetry) and you could buy ready-made trim (passmenterie) to make fashion easier to achieve.

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Yes, what you say does accord with what (little) I know about Austen's world.

I believe you're right and I'm wrong.

So you think this kind of gown isn't the kind of thing Jane would have chosen for herself?

I've just posted a copy of the Stanier Clarke portrait which shows a woman of high fashion who might just possibly be Jane. I'd be interested to know what you think of it.

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Don't know whether it's Jane Austen or not, but it looks more like period fashion plates from Ackerman's - the line of the body, proportions of the garments in relation to each other etc etc. There's also plenty of colour around the head and shoulders, which is very much a period 'look' (there are loads of great colour plates of period clothing at Jessamyn's Regency Costume Companion http://www.songsmyth.com/linksgenuinegarments.html)

I wasn't really trying to say Austen wouldn't have chosen a white gown, but more that the Victorians imagined their mothers and grandmothers didn't wear anything but virginal white and the way the sleeves are done in the portrait above smacks of later ideas on dress 'back then'.

It was also far more rare for women to wear white than we imagine. Georgian women were very fond of using pattern and trim, even if that meant using whitework embroidery or spotted/sprigged muslin to adorn a plain white gown. I was also trying to say that the dandyism associated with Mr Brummel started early for both girls and boys and Miss Austen was never averse to those attitudes ;-)

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