Portrait miniature of Anne of Cleves (1515-1557)

For three centuries this tiny portrait has carried a story, that it is the very picture Henry VIII was shown in 1539 before he agreed to marry Anne of Cleves. The story goes back to George Vertue, an 18th-century engraver and antiquary, who saw it in the 1720s and noted that it was supposed to be the one shown to the king. Nobody has been able to prove it. Holbein painted her in watercolour on vellum, face-on against a blue ground. The ivory box that holds it is probably younger, turned on a lathe late in the 16th century, a skill common in Germany at the time and rare in England. Its lid is carved as a Tudor rose and still screws onto the base, and paint losses at the edge of the miniature suggest it was trimmed to fit inside.