Good Morrow Mistress Cresacre!

Heading out to look for some Autumn scenes and colours, I ended up finding something completely different! 

I passed a bric-a-brac shop that I had wanted to visit for years and it was finally open. The first thing I saw on entering was this Holbein the Younger print and had a bit of a deja vu! I've been a Tudor fan since I was about 4, my dad read me Ladybird books, my mum told me the gruesome histories of Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard and Mary Queen of Scots (nowadays my mum would probably have to explain herself to the social services!). Here in the midst of rural Lower Saxony, I'd bumped into Mistress Anne Cresacre, ward and future daughter-in-law of Thomas More; Henry VIII's chancellor who lost his head for refusing to accept Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. 

Why deja vu? Because years ago I'd sketched her in an old sketchbook and here she is. 

Being a Tudor fan, Holbein’s portraits are fascinating and a highlight of my life was seeing his portrait of Jane Seymour in Vienna, I felt like she was standing in front of me. Personally, I prefer the preparatory sketches to the finished work. Holbein’s sketches are done with a very limited palette of chalks, minimal strokes and yet he manages to capture the personality of his subjects perhaps more than in his finished work. 

The Holbein sketch of Anne was done in 1526-27, the years in which Henry VIII was ''losing his head'' over Anne Boleyn, and was for a family portrait of Thomas More and His family (the painting was lost in a 17th Century fire, but there are two known copies of the work). The sketch of Anne shows her beautifully attired, befitting a lady of her status, with a few light strokes Holbein even transports the feeling of the fabrics she is wearing, moiré silk but what I love is her sceptical expression, that little rise of the eyebrow. Anne has none of the flirty, trouty-pouty look that you see in selfies, to me she looks as is she doesn’t really want to be sketched. 

Holbein’s finished portraits are magnificent, so detailed and ''polished'' but in his sketches I feel he gives more of an insight into the personality of his sitters, Mistress Cresacre is critical and sceptical of what is going on. At this point she was still Thomas More's ward, she marries his son first in 1529, so maybe she didn’t feel that she truly belonged in a ''family'' portrait. 

Fortunately, she had no idea that the King’s flirting of 1526/7 would lead to the beheading of her future father-in-law in 1535, a new religion in England and ultimately the execution of Anne Boleyn, the object of Henry’s advances. In 1526, she was Mistress Anne Cresacre aged 15, subject of a sketch by Hans Holbein, her future was a blank sheet of paper just like the one Holbein was sketching on. Little did she know that she would marry twice, bear 9 children and die at the age of 66, having experienced how brutal life under the Tudors could be!