Anne of Cleves Returns to St John's

On Tuesday 19 November, Dr Georgy Kantor, Keeper of Pictures, hosted a small gathering in the President's Lodgings to mark the return of Anne of Cleves to the St John's art collection.

Since June, this portrait has been displayed at the National Portrait Gallery as part of their major exhibition, Six Lives: The Stories of Henry VIII’s Queens. It was a treat to see this remarkable portrait back in College and restored to its original frame.

About the Portrait:

This portrait was purchased in c.1734 by St John's College President, William Holmes, for his private collection. It was later acquired for the College by his successor, William Derham in 1748. Anne of Cleves was only officially recognised as the sitter in 1855, in J. W. Burgon’s Arms of the Colleges of Oxford. The date and authorship of the painting long remained debatable. Following major conservation work on the portrait in 1989/90, the conservator Candy Kuhl and the then Keeper of Pictures at St John’s, Professor Peter Hacker, persuasively argued in the Burlington Magazine for the date in the 1530s at the court of Cleves, before Anne came to England to marry Henry. Bartholomaeus Bruyn the Elder (1493–1555), a Cologne painter known to have worked for the court of Cleves, emerged as the most likely artist. As Hacker and Kuhl note, ‘it is within the bounds of possibility’ that this is one of the two portraits that the Cleves ambassador Dr Henry Olisleger had shown to Henry VIII’s representatives to initiate the marriage negotiations.

A note of uncertainty remained, however, as Bruyn did not sign his paintings, and at a later date the painting was glued to a new panel, dated by dendrochronology to c.1650, which made narrowing down the date within the sixteenth century difficult. At the time of Candy Kuhl's conservation work, the frame of the portrait was seen as part of the later work, contemporary with the panel at the back, particularly as it was gilded and given additional decoration in the Victorian period. The portrait was redisplayed in a new frame made by a local Oxford frame-maker, and the old panel was gathering dust in our picture store.

In 2015, as part of a major survey of historic picture frames in our collection undertaken for St John’s, Timothy Newbery identified the frame as having characteristic stylistic features for the Lower Rhine workshops in the 1520s–30s, which confirms the dating of the portrait and its attribution to an artist connected to the court of Cleves. The unusual arched form of the panel and the frame makes it certain that it was custom-made for the portrait. This year, he has been able to remove the Victorian gilding and restore the original colour scheme of the frame. As he notes in his report, ‘the arch format and moulding profile of this frame is derived from altar triptychs which were made in Flanders from about 1518’, such as The Last Judgement and the Seven Acts of Mercy of c.1518–19 by Barend van Orley (1487–1541) now in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts at Antwerp or the later Noli Me Tangere by Jan van Scorel (1492-1562) now at Birmingham. Significantly, there is a double portrait of Johann von Rolixwerth and his wife Christina von Sternberg (1529) by Bruyn, now in the Mauritshuis, The Hague, for which the original frames with very similar arches to that on the St John’s Anne of Cleves survive. This makes the attribution to Bruyn or an artist from his workshop additionally likely.

Following the restoration of the frame, the portrait itself was lovingly conserved for St John's by Georgie Dennis. The National Portrait Gallery's exhibition was the first time in nearly two centuries that Anne of Cleves was displayed in its original frame.

We are delighted to welcome Anne of Cleves back into the College's art collection. If you'd like to learn more about the St John's collection, you can visit many of our artworks virtually.