If your money was on “blocking”, then, surprisingly, you’ve lost, to the even more entertaining option.
Which is how they have the exact same pose of the hands (including clasping the kirtle gem in the other hand)
Same line on the same puffed sleeves (I’ll grant that “Anne Boleyn, 1536″ has more ornamentation)
Same “doublet” design to the shoulder - The 1570 gown is much more dramatic, but the “Anne Boleyn” portrait has a very clear flair to it that you generally don’t associate with the 1530s, especially since the staple sleeve during the 1530s was the hanging sleeve style - You generally don’t see exposed sleeves like this.
Same silhouette
Now, they claim, in the (poorly) blacked out areas of the text, that the original artist was Hans Holbein, but I FIRMLY believe that it isn’t a Holbein. It doesn’t match anything of his style, that hyper realism that he was well-known for. (Frankly, if the man could make Thomas More look like a DILF, he could do better with Anne.) Now, he might have made it in a hurry, but that doesn’t explain how a “contemporary portrait of Anne” matches up FREAKISHLY well to a portrait painted nearly 40 years after Anne’s execution. It just doesn’t. Everything is telling me, clearly, that this portrait was painted in the 1570s. I don’t believe, at least not yet, that it was intended to be a direct copy of the other - Rather that they reflect the same fashions from the same time. I do think, from the amount of wear and tear on the portrait, that it might very well be an old portrait - I don’t THINK they single-handedly created it. I’m willing to give them that VERY, very small benefit of the doubt, though they’re on very, very thin ice. But I do think that they sensationalized it to be something that it isn’t, and got a lot of people’s hopes up in the process.
So, what do I think happened?
Well, I’m a Celticist, not an art historian (dammit Jim), so I’ll leave them to make a final verdict, but, since we’re just SAYING things now, here’s my personal theory: If I was an art collector in the 1570s, the lack of an Anne portrait would REALLY bug me if I also had, say, portraits of Elizabeth (aka “Current Queen of England”, a MUST for any collector) and Henry. So, I commission a man to create ~Anne Boleyn~. There’s only one problem: No Annes exist. Nada. Zilch. So, our man creates an Anne, ready for display in his patron’s hall - He knows a few basic features of early 16th century Tudor fashion - Hence why, for example, there’s no ruff on either the sleeve or at Anne’s neck, as well as a gable hood, but he still falls back to his own time period, not entirely unlike all those illuminated manuscripts that show Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great in chain mail. MAYBE he does attach Holbein’s name, to give it an aura of credibility - After all, Holbein WAS the court painter of the Tudors. It gets stuffed away, and then discovered by someone who, frankly, should never, ever have discovered it because they didn’t go through basic factchecking before glurging it out to the public. I have my suspicions about where the portrait might have originated from, but since I don’t know more than the public and, again, I’m not an art historian, I’ll keep THOSE to myself and focus on what I can prove or that is reasonable speculation.
