TPO Writing - دوازده

TPO Writing - Twelve

The evidence linking this portrait to Jane Austen is not at all convincing.

Sure, the painting has long been somewhat loosely connected to Austen’s extended family and their descendants, but this hardly proves it’s a portrait of Jane Austen as a teenager. The reading’s arguments that the portrait is of Austen are questionable at best.

First, when the portrait was authorized for use in the 1882 publication of her letters, Jane Austen had been dead for almost 70 years. So the family members who asserted that the painting was Jane had never actually seen her themselves. They couldn’t have known for certain if the portrait was of Austen or not.

Second, the portrait could very well be that of a relative of Austen’s, a fact that would explain the resemblance between its subject and that of Cassandra’s sketch. The extended Austen family was very large and many of Jane Austen’s female cousins were teenagers in the relevant period or had children who were teenagers. And some of these teenage girls could have resembled Jane Austen. In fact, many experts believe that the truesubject of the portrait was one of those relatives, Marianne Kempian, who was a distant niece of Austen’s.

Third, the painting has been attributed to Humphrey only because of the style. But other evidence points to a later date. A stamp on the back of the picture indicates that the blank canvas, you know the actual piece of cloth on which the picture was painted, was sold by a man named William Legg.

Record showed that William Legg did not sell canvases in London when Jane Austen was a teenager. He only started selling canvases when she was 27 years old. So it looks like the canvas was used for the painting at a time hen Austen was clearly older than the girl in the portrait.