Anne Boleyn face swap

Where this one comes from

This is the picture everyone pictures when they hear the name, and it was made some fifty years after she died — the National Portrait Gallery dates it between 1584 and 1603, by an unknown English hand, copying a lost original. Almost nothing painted of Anne Boleyn in her lifetime survived her: after her execution in 1536 her images were taken down, and what we have descends from copies made once it was safe again under her daughter.

What is in the picture

A French hood set back off the forehead, a string of pearls, and hanging from it the gold B that is the single most reproduced piece of jewellery in English history. The face is pale, long and narrow with dark eyes, and it is painted flatly, in the plain workshop manner of late Elizabethan portraiture rather than with any of Holbein’s observation. It is less a likeness than a badge: the hood, the pearls, the B, and everyone in the room knows who is meant.

When people use it

For a reputation you did not choose. It fits the moment when the version of events going round is not yours, and it carries a particular weight over anything about being talked about rather than talked to.

How your face lands in it

A flat, evenly lit, front-facing head with the hood closing it on both sides — technically one of the more forgiving pictures in the catalogue. Because the painting was never a close likeness in the first place, your face sits in it without the uncanny effect you get when a swap displaces a sharply observed portrait. The B pendant and the hood do all the identifying work and neither of them moves.

Anne Boleyn — Unknown English artist, c. 1584. The panel was painted between about 1584 and 1603 by an unidentified artist, placing it in the public domain worldwide by several centuries; Wikimedia Commons publishes the reproduction on that basis. Source

Also in: Paintings · Royal portraits · Tudor portraits