Anne Boleyn’s sister revealed as the face of royal portrait

IT HAS been in the Royal Collection for hundreds of years, catalogued anonymously as a Portrait of a Woman, possibly copied from a lost picture by Hans Holbein, court painter to Henry VIII.

Now its sitter has been identified as Mary Boleyn, the king’s beguiling mistress and elder sister of his beheaded second wife Anne, who was beheaded at the Tower of London in 1536 after being found guilty of adultery, incest and plotting to kill her husband.

She was recognised as the subject of a 17th-century work named simply Por

trait of a Woman that formed part of a set of 14 “Beauties”, including duchesses and countesses, by Flemish artist Remigius van Leemput that adorned Queen Anne’s bathing room at Windsor Castle 300 years ago.

Tests carried out on the painting’s wooden panel by the Jordaens Van Dyck Panel Paintings Project, based at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels, matched it to another previously unidentified painting in the set, which had a direct link to Mary. It featured Lady Herbert, who married Thomas Carey, Mary’s great-grandson.

Researchers then delved into the archives at the National Portrait Gallery in London and found two very similar paintings with inscriptions bearing the two women’s names.

All the paintings except Portrait of a

Woman were moved to Queen Victoria’s drawing room at Windsor Castle in the 19th century, and are now in Highgrove House, the private residence of the Prince of Wales. Portrait of a Woman was sent to Hampton Court before being taken to its current spot in 1995 – in the bedroom of Mary, Queen of Scots, at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh.

Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and curator of the Royal Collection, the largest private art collection in the world, told The Sunday Telegraph: “It’s been an anonymous person in Tudor costume until now. When a stray is reunited with the family, there’s joy in heaven.”