Portrait of Jane Seymour (1509?-1537)

The Mauritshuis labels this small panel as studio of Holbein, and then says in the same breath that it is so good he may have painted it himself. The case for his own hand grew after a cleaning in 2004, when the portrait turned out to follow Holbein's chalk drawing of Jane at Windsor more closely than the larger painted version in Vienna does. Some scholars also think it is the picture the Dutch painter and biographer Karel van Mander saw in a house on the Warmoesstraat in Amsterdam in 1604 and described as an original.

Jane Seymour, Henry VIII's third wife, wears a dress worked with gold thread, a string of pearls and a pendant set with precious stones. The portrait probably belonged before 1700 to William III, the Dutch stadholder who was also king of England, and it stayed in his family's collection from then on, apart from twenty years in Paris after the French confiscations of 1795.