Portrait of Olivia Boteler Porter

John and Joséphine Bowes bought this portrait in Paris in 1866. By the time their museum opened at Barnard Castle in 1892 it hung as School of Van Dyck, and the sitter had at one point been taken for Queen Henrietta Maria. In March 2013 the art historian Bendor Grosvenor, going through photographs on Your Paintings, the online record of Britain's publicly owned art, asked to see it. Cleaned of its yellowed varnish, it turned out to be an unlined canvas of the 1630s. Pigment analysis at University College London ruled out a later copy, and Christopher Brown, then director of the Ashmolean and a van Dyck specialist, accepted the hand as his. The sitter is Olivia Boteler Porter, lady-in-waiting to Henrietta Maria and wife of Endymion Porter, who bought pictures for Charles I and was a friend of the painter. Cleaning also gave her back her gaze, where a dark glaze and a highlight had been lost from one pupil.