English School portrait of Edward VI, estimate $30,000-$50,000, at Andrew Jones Auctions.
Estimated at $30,000-50,000, it is among the highlights of a single-owner collection from Pebble Beach offered on April 28-29.
As the future of the Tudor dynasty, a number of portraits of Edward exist of him as the Prince of Wales and a nine-year-old king. This image showing him wearing a black and gold embroidered doublet trimmed with ermine copies a full-length portrait known in several versions that is associated with the workshop of the enigmatic court artist ‘Master John’.
Seemingly an Englishman, he came to prominence in the years after the death of former court favourite Hans Holbein in 1543. The ‘Master John’ portrait of Edward in the National Portrait Gallery was almost certainly painted immediately after Edward became king in 1547.
The Pebble Beach picture – a half-length oil on a cradled panel measuring 2ft 5in x 22in (74 x 56cm) - is catalogued as ‘English School 16th or 17th century’.
Provenance
It has a detailed provenance since the 19th century, having previously been in the collection of Kimbolton Castle, the country house in Cambridgeshire that is most famous as the final home of Henry VIII’s first (divorced) wife Catherine of Aragon who died there in 1536. The picture was deemed sufficiently important at the time to hang at some of the most famous exhibitions of the Victorian era.
It was part of the Exhibition of Art Treasures held at Manchester Botanical Gardens in 1857. the largest temporary art exhibition in British history with more than 16,000 works of art and 1.3 million visitors. In 1866 it was among the 1035 pictures shown at the South Kensington Museum (later the V&A Museum) at the first Exhibition of National Portraits and in 1890 was at the Exhibition of the Royal House of Tudor at the New Gallery, a Bond Street address now the flagship store for the Burberry brand.
The only surviving son of Henry VIII by his third wife, Jane Seymour, Edward VI (1537–53) was king of England and Ireland from 1547-53. The first English monarch to be raised a Protestant, he was crowned on February 20, 1547, at the age of nine and died aged 15 on July 6, 1553. Despite attempts to prevent the country's return to Catholicism, his half-sister Mary I succeeded him.
The portrait is one of several Old Master paintings in the collection. Estimated at $50,000-70,000 is a Venetian painting depicting the visit of the British diplomat Charles Montagu (1662-1722), 1st Earl of Manchester, to the Venetian court in 1698.
First audience of his Excellency the Right Honourable Charles, Earl of Manchester with the Doge and Senate of Venice, 1698, estimate $50,000-$70,000 at Andrew Jones Auctions.
Montagu’s mission in Venice was multifaceted: to affirm and strengthen the Anglo-Venetian alliance, to secure support against France in the unfolding scenarios of European politics, and to promote English trade interests.
This monumental canvas, measuring 4ft 3in x 6ft (1.3 x 1.8m), was painted by a Venetian artist at the time to record his first audience with the Doge and the Senate.
