FACE OF ANNE OF CLEVES | Story behind the painting | Hans Holbein the younger. Six wives documentary

if you're a tutor enthusiast you've probably seen this portrait before it shows anne of cleves as painted by hans holbein the younger and is often credited with being the reason henry viii sent for her to make her his fourth queen as you may know however he decided immediately upon meeting her that he didn't like her after all and while he couldn't get out of the wedding he did manage to have the union annulled six months later as a result of this fiasco this is one of the most scrutinized tudor paintings around and in comments under my other videos about anne i often see people stating as a fact that holbein essentially tricked henry by making her look more beautiful than she was and that the artist must have been in deep trouble with the king once he saw his bride in the flesh is any of this true though and what do we actually know about the story behind the painting when and how was it created how likely is it to be an accurate representation of anne's appearance did henry's displeasure with his new wife affect holbein in any way and what happened to it after the disintegration of henry and anne's marriage all the answers are coming up before we get to that though i'm very excited to announce that this video is sponsored by the lovely people over at history hit history hit is like netflix but all history it brings you the stories that have shaped our world through an award-winning podcast network and an online history channel they have literally hundreds of programs over a thousand podcast episodes and five thousand history related travel articles and they launch 15 new podcast episodes and two new programs every week whilst dance knows history hit continues to be the world's leading history podcast they also have four podcasts covering the ancients warfare gone medieval and not just the tudors which is hosted by susanna lipscombe in addition to all this there is also patented betwixt the sheets and american history hit one of their podcast episodes which i've listened to recently was hosted by professor lipscomb and is all about who else anne of cleves in that episode she chats to one of anne's biographers heather r darcy all about the life of henry's fourth wife and they cover topics including what anne's real name was and when she was actually born spoiler alert it might not be the date in september widely thought to be her birthday heather darcy also has a fascinating theory about why she thinks the cleaves marriage field which has to do with foreign policy like the birthday mystery however you'll need to listen to the episode to hear all the details i've also been enjoying professor lipscomb's program becoming anne boleyn this documentary focuses on anne's life before she began her relationship with henry viii it includes a visit to the queen's childhood home heaver castle and discussions about anne's education her relationship with her siblings and her time at the court of margaret of austria and as a lydian wedding to her future sister-in-law mary tudor queen of france and queen claude of france the documentary is also a treat for anyone interested in unsurviving possessions as it showcases two books she owned and inscribed if you'd like to enjoy these offerings as well as history hits huge array of other programs for yourself click the link in the description box below which will take you to their subscribe page you can also get a whopping 50 of your next three months when you use the code history calling at checkout once again thank you to history hit for sponsoring this video and now let's hear more about anne of cleve's portrait it's 15 39 and henry viii is on the hunt for a new wife after the death in october 1537 of his previous queen jane seymour two of the women on the shortlist are the sisters of the duke of cleves anne and amalia but henry isn't going to marry anyone's sight unseen and soon his ambassadors in cleves are seeking pictures of the duke's sisters which they can send to their master this proves rather tricky though in march henry's top minister thomas cromwell tells him a van that everyone praises the ladies beauty both of face and body one said she excelled the duchess as the golden sun did the silver moon this is a reference to another contender for henry's hand christina of denmark dowager duchess of milan who is famously beautiful still anne's brother is being rather tardy about sending any picture on the 3rd of may the ambassadors on the ground in cleves nicholas wooden and richard beard tell cromwell that they have been promised portraits of anne and amalia within 14 days and which were created within the previous six months they are wary of committing themselves to the authenticity of any such portraits however as they have not been allowed to see the ladies themselves except when they were wearing what the ambassadors call a monstrous habit and apparel which allowed quote no sight neither of their faces nor of their persons when they pointed this problem out however the chancellor in cleves was offended asking would you see them naked and insisting that the portraits that the duke will send are true likenesses negotiations continue and the ambassadors promise to send the two pictures on to england as soon as they have them in july cromwell writes that the english ambassadors are to quote desire to see both ladies since one of them is to be their queen and with all diligence thereupon signify their judgments and if the pictures be not already sent by richard beard they shall send them if they may be possible gotten with their opinion of them as likenesses this is presumably a reference to the pictures which are then being undertaken or which are about to be undertaken by henry's own court painter hans holbain who has been scurrying around europe for over a year already getting images of prospective brides his pictures of the cleave sisters are complete by the 11th of august for on that day nicholas wooten writes to henry that your gracious servant hans albine here we get to see how much names can be changed by 16th century spelling hath taken the effigies of my lyrian and the lady amelie o'malley in other words and have expressed their images very lively the pictures are now sent to england posthaste for inspection and on the 1st of september the french ambassador to england charles de marillac writes to his own royal master that he has recently learned quote that an excellent painter whom this king sent to germany to bring the portrait of the sister of the duke of cleves recently arrived in court and immediately afterwards a courier bringing among other news which is still kept secret news that the said duke's ambassadors have started to come hither to treat and conclude the marriage of this king and the said lady the reference is to anne of cleves and on the basis of holbein's portrait of her she has apparently passed the required beauty test and is on course to be queen of england but what did henry see at this point was it the final painting a preparatory drawing of anne which has not survived but which would have resembled these preparatory drawings of some of holbein's other subjects or this miniature also painted by holbein and now residing in the victoria and albert museum in london we don't know but the main portrait must have been completed by early 1540 at the latest because given what happened in anne's marriage there would have been no point in finishing it off later than that as we're on the subject of anne's portraiture some people have also argued that this picture which i firmly believe to be catherine howard is also anne and was painted during her queen ship but i have a whole other video explaining why that isn't the case i'll leave it linked on screen and below for you the main painting was painted on vellum which was originally pasted onto wood then later transferred to canvas and it is 0.65 meters high and not .48 meters wide it is a three-quarter length portrait of the then 23 or 24 year old anne who holbein shows standing and staring directly out at the viewer she is wearing the traditional clothing of cleaves which starts with a heavy looking roughly rectangular shaped golden headdress extensively worked with pearls and beads and which covers up all of her hair though we know from an english chronicler who saw her a few months later on her wedding day that she was a blonde the headdress is topped by a fine white veal which extends outwards at the sides and projects forwards at the front in a manner which slightly reminds me of the peak on a baseball cap her skin is pale which was in sync with the beauty standards of the time her complexion is clear her forehead high and she has brown eyes full lips and a slightly pointed chin moving down the portrait her dress is mainly crimson and seems to be made of velvet though the bodice is heavily trimmed with cloth of gold around a square-shaped full neckline and there are bands of gold around her upper arms above which are some seriously puffy shoulders which give the impression of very broad shoulders there are two panels of gold around the long flowing cuffs one panel thicker than the other and a golden belt to cinch in her waist and show off her slim physique from this belt to send yet more golden stripes all of this golden cloth is decorated in a diamond pattern and embellished with pearls in the centers of the diamonds the choice of fabrics and stones all emphasize anne's wealth and royal rank why did i say the dress had a full neckline though well because if you look at it you can see that although the golden cloth gives the appearance of quite a low square neck in fact anne is either wearing another garment underneath possibly her smoke which we'll come back to in a moment or else the dress incorporates a panel of what looks like embroidered muslin or perhaps silk the presence of this extra material means that in fact she is covered up to her neck the full neckline is further embellished with a golden collar and strip of cloth these are what create the square shape edged with pearls and containing 17 circular motifs which look like flowers with precious stones in the middle if we look at her hands which are clasped in front of her at waist height we can see the cuffs of her smock these are white drawn tight around her wrists and embroidered in gold around the edges as for jewelry anne wears at least five golden rings set with dark stones though one on her left hand is barely visible due to the way she has clasped her fingers together around her neck we see two ropes of gold while a gold cross set with five black stones hangs from the center of her collar she is painted against a plain background so that unlike the portraits of henry viii and his family and a solo image of elizabeth the first as a teenager which i have other videos on there are no props and no setting to discuss those other videos by the way are linked in the description box below now we come to the question of how accurate this portrait is likely to be and whether holbein got into any trouble with henry when the king saw his bride in person hans holbein is famous for how true to life his images were anne was not the first of henry's wives he painted and if we look at his solo portrait of jane seymour we see that he was not given to flattering his subjects no matter how high their rank jane looks plain of face and even rather haughty or grumpy looking back at the drawings i showed you earlier we can again appreciate just how real holbein images were and there is no reason to think that he flattered anne when he drew and painted her nor would it have been in his best interests to do so lying to henry viii to the point of tricking him into marrying a woman he would find repulsive would have been a life-threatening thing to do indeed thomas cromwell who helped to orchestrate the cleves marriage found his head on a block on the very day that henry married anne's successor and her former lydian wedding catherine howard even if holbein had felt under pressure from anne's relatives in cleves to pretty her up in order to help her catch henry when the artist arrived back in london he could easily have told the king that his drawing and painting were inaccurate and explained the situation he might even have been able to create a new more realistic drawing of anne for henry to look at once he was out of the court at cleves and before arriving back in england the idea that this is not an accurate picture of anne simply does not hold water for me furthermore we have other images of her of which this is one and which show a face remarkably similar to that in the picture we're studying in this video perhaps the clearest piece of evidence we have that holbein didn't mess up on the job though is the fact that henry didn't punish him nor is there any clear record of the king complaining that he had been duped by the picture it is true that he didn't commission many more paintings from holbein that we know of but bear in mind that it was now 1540 and the artist would die in 1543. he was nearing the end of his life and perhaps not in sufficiently good health to maintain the kind of output he had once produced in any case he also had work from other members of the court to keep him busy too so is there any evidence at all that the portrait was deemed inaccurate and what do we actually know about why henry disliked dan for this information we need to turn to the depositions made by henry's servants regarding the royal marriage during the annulment proceedings in the early summer of 1540. these are problematic because they were coloured by hindsight and self-interest they were made months after anne's arrival when henry servants knew he sought for rid himself of her and they were anxious to help him get what he wanted this makes it difficult to know if they are telling the absolute truth and this caveat should be borne in mind when you hear what they had to say lord russell who was the lord admiral reported that he saw the king at his first view of the queen at rochester marvelously astonished and abashed and the next day the king asked him if he thought the woman so fair and of such beauty as report had been made of her to which she answered that he took her not for fair but to be of a brown complexion and the king said alas whom should men trust i promise you i see no such thing in her as hath been showed unto me of her and am ashamed that men have sue praised her as they have done and i like her not this is the closest thing i could find to a reference to the painting made by henry who supposedly said that he saw nothing in anne as hath been showed unto me of her but it is a secondhand report made several months later and it is impossible to know if this is meant to be a dig at the picture if it is a detail that russell has added in or if given the differences between early modern and modern english by showed henry meant told i think had he complained about the portraits specifically russell would have clarified that point if only to shift some of the blame for the whole situation onto holbein as for her complexion though anne had traveled in the winter it is nevertheless possible that she picked up a slight tan or was ill from the trip giving her the darker skin tone russell mentioned besides that comment was merely his opinion and quite a clever little observation too as it allowed him to say something which could be construed either as an insult or merely an observation leaving him some wiggle room in the future if it turned out that henry liked anne after all sir anthony brown master of the king's horse was also deposed and he too confirmed that henry had disliked anne from the start saying that being sent to the queen at rochester by the king on new year's day with a message that he had brought her a new year's gift he was never more dismayed in all his life to see the lady so far unlike that which was reported but on his return he said nothing of this to the king nor durst not when the king entered to embrace and kiss her he noted on his countenance a discontentment and misliking of her person and the king tarried not to speak with her 20 words when returning from rochester to greenwich in his barge the king said to him very sadly and pensively i see nothing in this woman as men report of her and i marvel that wise men would make such report as they have done again henry's emphasis here is on what he had been told by others about anne's looks and there is no mention of the portrait we also don't hear from these comments about the disastrous first meeting anne and henry had when he barged in on her and embraced her without telling her who he was and she essentially ignored him and went back to watching the bullfight she was viewing out her window thus wounding her soon-to-be husband's ego had that first meeting gone better henry might not have taken umbrage against her and history could well have turned out very differently it wasn't just her feast that was the issue though according to sir thomas hennig henry's problems were also with anne's body he deposed that ever since the king saw the queen he had never liked her and said as often as he went to bed to her he mistrusted the queen's virginity by reason of the looseness of her breasts and other tokens and the marriage had never been consummated anthony denney who was one of the gentlemen of the king's chamber said that he had continually praised the queen to the king who did not approve such praises but said ever she was no such as she was praised for and afterwards upon continual praisings the king told him as a confidential servant that he could not induce himself to have affection for her for she was not as reported again there is no mention of the painting here and had her breasts so slack and other parts of her body in such sort that he suspected her virginity and that he could never consummate the marriage during thomas cromwell's fatal fall from favor he also wrote letters in which he recalled speaking with henry about the king's feelings towards anne in which he noted the monarch saying much the same things as reported elsewhere for instance henry had told him that she was nothing so well as she was spoken of and that by her breasts and belly she should be no meat which when i felt them straight me so to the heart that i had neither will nor courage to prove the rest at another time the king said of his new wife that she is nothing so fair as she hath been reported so henry had been told by his ambassadors that anne was a great beauty and had expected her to be so but although he was disappointed by her face he never accused holbein of tricking him and he complained about her body as well furthermore though he made specific comments on her figure neither he nor anyone else could point to any particular fault in her looks beyond possibly having a slightly darker complexion than expected in fact the only clear reference we get to the painting comes from the earl of southampton he met anne at calais and later said that considering it was no time to dispraise her whom so many had by reports and painting so much extolled he did by his letters much praise her the earl of essex that's thomas cromwell laid sore to his charge that he had so much praise the queen by his letters from calais and declared his intention to turn the king's miscontentment upon him what i take from southampton's testimony and indeed all of the other witness statements is that no one had a bad word to say about anne's looks until after henry had decided that he didn't like her and we have to ask ourselves if his ambassadors and cleves who were under strict orders to report back on her face and how accurate pictures of her were would have misled the king on that point what seems more likely is that she was perfectly pleasant looking but perhaps not to henry's taste and that the first impression she made on him during their awkward initial meeting poisoned him against her other people including lord southampton had evidently seen holbein's portrait but no one seems to have said that it showed anything displeasing and we have no record of anyone ever pointing out any inaccuracy in it southampton may very well have thought she looked absolutely fine in january 1540 only pretending later that he had merely been trying to be tactful when cromwell threatened to turn the king's ire on him and pointing out then that no one else had ever raised any complaints up to that point in fact his prius of her was completely in line with everything else henry had been told about her news of henry's disappointment in anne leaked out fast on the 5th of january 1540 charles de marlock wrote that the queen of england has arrived who according to some who saw her close is not so young as was expected nor so beautiful as everyone affirmed she is tall and very assured in carriage and countenance showing that in her the turn and vivacity of wit supplies the place of beauty she brings from her brother's country 12 or 15 damsels inferior in beauty even to their mistress and dressed so heavily and unbecomingly that they would almost be thought ugly even if they were beautiful that same day he told king francis of france that when the queen arrived she was clothed in the fashion of the country from which she came and he meaning the king received her very graciously and conducted her into his house at greenwich to the chamber prepared for her she looks about 30 years of age she was actually 24 tall and thin of medium beauty and a very assured and resolute countenance in these comments i think we can see three problems one is something i've already mentioned namely that anne's looks were probably over hyped in their excitement at getting a new queen the english had built her up in their minds to be a kind of goddess instead she seems to have been a perfectly pleasant looking young woman but nothing extraordinary of medium beauty just as de marlock said the second issue is the first impression she and her ladies made which was unfortunately quite poor their germanic clothing was completely at odds with the fashions at the english court which you can see represented on these wax works of henry's other five wives who are positioned alongside anne and as de marillac said to her new people the dresses made the queen and her already disappointing women look even more unbecoming the final issue is that de marillac is apparently reporting the words of others he says his information comes from quote some who saw her close indicating that he himself had not and that this is not an eyewitness report so in short anne of cleves was pleasant looking though not a great beauty and holbein's portrait of her seems to have been an accurate likeness only when it was ascertained that the king didn't like her did anyone say anything negative about her appearance and even then no specific fault save a darker than expected complexion was ever mentioned the painting itself was barely ever brought up in such conversations either indicating that no real error could be fined with it nor did henry punish holbein as might be expected if the image was inaccurate the king and his court had talked themselves into believing they were getting a veritable venus as a queen a standard of beauty hardly any woman could live up to and his disappointment disastrous first meeting with her the fact that her looks may not have been to his taste his attraction to catherine howard and the king and the queen's problems in the bedroom which he unjustly blamed on anne by slandering her figure all combined to ensure that he never gave the marriage a chance in exchange for not contesting the annulment anne was given the title of the king's sister a clutch of houses and goods lots of money and tooled to stay in england for the rest of her life which she julie did she outlived henry and all his other wives dying in 1557 to learn more about her life death and last will and testament see my other videos on her which are linked below for you but while anne has long since died her portrait lives on and you might be surprised to learn where it has ended up and how it got there we know that henry owned the portrait in 1540 and there is no reason to assume that despite anne's fall from fever he and his immediate successors didn't keep this picture of his new sister in the royal collection by the early stewart period however it had passed into the ownership of thomas howard earl of arundel who lived between 1585 and 1646. in 1642 he took it with him to the netherlands and whilst there this engraving was made of it in 1648 by wenceslaus holler as you can tell from the inscription along the bottom of the picture if you're wondering about the other engraving i've shown you of anne that was created by jacobus hubracken in 1739 but it was done using the miniature i showed you a few minutes ago after arundel's death the larger painting went to his widow and appears in a 1655 inventory taken of the countess's goods after her own death in 1662 the arundel son william howard vicar stafford sold it to a merchant named everhard yabek who was working in paris and in 1671 it was purchased by none other than king louis xiv of france appearing in lists of his artworks compiled in 1676 by charles patton and 1683 by charles lebrun when the famous louvre museum opened in 1793 the painting was displayed there under the title gene of cleaves i'm not sure how that error happened but it was the middle of the french revolution so i guess the curators had other things on their minds the louvre has remained its home ever since and you can still see anne there today a german princess married to an english king who has ended up on the walls of france's most prestigious museum and that gang brings us to the end of this deep dive into hans holbein's portrait of anne of cleves and what it told henry viii his court and us about her looks if you enjoyed this video please remember to give it a thumbs up and leave a comment below letting me know if you think the portrait and the written evidence suggest anne was good looking as always a big thank you to my patrons whose generous support helps me to keep creating these videos there's a link to my patreon account in the description box if anyone else is interested in joining and getting some extra perks i'd also like to say thank you to those of you who give me one-off donations using the thanks button underneath my videos it's all greatly appreciated though i do always like to emphasize too that there is no pressure on anyone to support in either of these ways so please don't feel obliged to i'm always just super grateful to have viewers and especially viewers who are still watching this far into a video that's all for this week but i'll be back next time with something new and until then keep learning

Channel: History Calling

Views: 62,475

Keywords: Six wives documentary, history of tudor England, hans holbein the younger, Tudor scandal, portrait of a tudor, famous work of art, story behind the painting, Tudors documentary, henry viii and anne of cleves, face of anne of cleves, life of anne of cleves, history calling, Anna of Cleves, Anne of Kleves, Anna of Kleves

Id: AIerL1Bug-U

Length: 27min 28sec (1648 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 14 2022