Is This Jane Austen?

[poliphilo]

This is the Rice portrait of the teenage Jane Austen which is being sold at Christie's today. 

Is it authentic ? 

Hmmmmmm. 

It's supported by oral tradition but...

...Some people think the frock is all wrong for the 1780s.

Short of going back in a Tardis we're never going to know.

But it's pretty, isn't it?

Comments

[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!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

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.

[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*

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

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.

[amberb-uk.livejournal.com]

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)!

[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.