Expert Opinion

We are extremely grateful for the unstinting support of many experts and academics over the years, who have articulated their belief in the Rice Portrait. These individuals have had the integrity and courage to stand up for the truth, sometimes at their own personal and professional cost.

Art Experts

angus stewart

Angus Stewart is a well-known independent art curator and critic and Vice President of the International Association of Art Critics. His exhibitions have included Twentieth Century British artists, ceramics, Tibetan religious art and Middle Eastern culture. He has been published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, The Burlington Magazine, Apollo, Interiors, Country Life, Art Review, and numerous newspapers and periodicals.

In 1994 he curated an exhibition as part of the Olympia Art Fair, of Jane Austen memorabilia, in which the Rice Portrait was included. Having closely examined the painting, Angus was and remains, utterly convinced that the portrait is Jane Austen by Ozias Humphry. A stalwart campaigner for the portrait ever since, he has written numerous letters and articles on the subject and, like us, is appalled by the hostility displayed towards the painting by the National Portrait Gallery. He has recorded that John Hayes, Director of the National Portrait Gallery at the time of the exhibition at Olympia, believed the painting to be of Jane Austen but that the Regency Curator, Jacob Simon, was entirely disinterested and refused his invitation to examine it. You can read more about this in the National Portrait Gallery Section.

brian STEWART

Brian Stewart was the Director of Falmouth Art Gallery from the year 2000 until his untimely death in 2010. As his obituary in the Guardian newspaper recorded, at Falmouth, Brian ‘proved that small galleries can have a mighty impact’. He was also co-author of the Dictionary of Portrait Painters, published in 1997. Brian was passionate about making art accessible, particularly to children, and, as another obituary in the Independent remarked, he was a breath of fresh air in the ‘surprisingly illiberal world of publicly funded galleries and museums’.

Brian Stewart was a passionate and longstanding supporter of the Rice Portrait and believed that the Rice Portrait portrays a young Jane Austen. In 2003 Brian exhibited the Rice Portrait at Falmouth Art Gallery for a number of weeks and published a booklet to accompany the exhibition.

Jacob Simon, Regency Curator at the National Portrait Gallery for many years claimed that he had visited the exhibition, discussed the portrait with Brian Stewart and examined it closely while it was on display there. None of these claims are true and Jacob Simon now states that he cannot recall whether he saw the oil painting or the leaflet when he visited Falmouth Art Gallery.

BRIAN SEWELL

Brian Sewell was a brilliant writer and longtime art critic for the Evening Standard until his death in September, 2015. Always outspoken and fearless in his views, Sewell was revered and feared in equal measure by the British art world. Many of the foremost figures in that fraternity have paid tribute to his influence, in the aftermath of his death. When the Rice Portrait was exhibited at Olympia in 1994, Brian carefully examined the picture and concluded it was correct. As he wrote in a letter to Mrs Rice’s son in 2013, ‘My belief - as I said long ago - is that the portrait is of Jane’.

In 2007, after the picture failed to sale at auction, Brian Sewell wrote: ‘The portrait is too important to ignore. It should return to London, be put on view at the NPG and be the subject of orderly debate rather than shrill innuendo from shameless costume historians who demonstrably know much less than they should. If it is then satisfactorily argued that the contrary evidence is flawed, that the provenance is indisputable, and that the girl in Ozias Humphry’s painting is indeed Jane Austen who, at 15, was precocious enough to write Love and Friendship, a delightful skit on Richardson (could this portrait celebrate that achievement?), then it should be secured here as a national treasure.’

You can read an article written by Brian Sewell on Ozias Humphry and the Rice Portrait HERE

CONALL MACFARLANE

Conall Macfarlane, who studied at the V&A, was for many years a fine art valuation expert, and later a Director, at Christie’s auction house in London. In 1985 he was asked to value the Rice Portrait for insurance purposes and while examining the picture he identified the monogram of the artist Ozias Humphry on the picture. In his valuation he unequivocally attributed the painting to Humphry and described it as a 'Portrait of a girl, possibly Jane Austen but certainly a member of the Austen family shown standing full length in a white dress holding a green parasol, a landscape beyond - signed with initials'. He goes on to say: 'Recent research would appear to indicate that this may be a portrait of the novelist as a child, circa 1790.' Now retired, Conall Macfarlane has always maintained this attribution.

Richard walker

Richard Walker, who died in 2010 at the age of 93, was the first professional art adviser to the Government, appointed in 1949. The following year, he became curator at the Palace of Westminster and continued to hold both posts until 1976. For the following nine years he was employed at the National Portrait Gallery as cataloguer in the NPG archive. He compiled a Regency Portraits Catalogue for the National Portrait Gallery, which was published in 1985, in which he attributed the Rice Portrait to Ozias Humphry but expressed doubts about the portrait being of Jane Austen. In December 1985 Richard Walker visited Henry Rice at his home to examine the portrait. Afterwards he wrote to thank Henry for the visit. He went on to say: ‘I must say I do think your research team has done admirable work and clearly we must all be less adamant in our opposition to her identification as Jane. It looks as though there is a distinct possibility of the ‘experts’ being mistaken in rigorously brushing aside any suggestion that it should be earlier than 1800.’ In 1993 he wrote to Deirdre Le Faye, stating that he thought the costume could date to the 1790s and in a report in October 1994 he wrote: ‘I myself, inexcusably dazzled by all these formidable authorities, accepted the costume objection and upheld it in my Regency Portraits of 1984.’ He went on to note that a great deal of research had been carried out by Henry Rice with ‘the disconcerting result that the costume experts may well have been over-confident in their judgement.’

Conservation Expert

EVA SCHWAN

Like many family owned paintings, the Rice Portrait had deteriorated over the years. Furthermore, previous interventions, which had included over-painting of the picture, were now considered inappropriate in the light of more modern techniques and so in 2010, the conservator Eva Schwan was commissioned to restore the Rice Portrait.

Based in Paris, Eva Schwan is a graduate of the Courtauld Institute and France’s Institut national du patrimoine (INP). She had carried out work for many prominent institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée National d'Art Moderne (Pompidou Centre) in Paris, the Courtauld Institute in London, Christie’s in London, Paris and New York, Sotheby’s in New York and The Museum of Fine Art in Houston, Texas, to name but a few. You can read Eva’s full CV HERE.

Eva spent months painstakingly cleaning the painting, inch by inch, and as a result she knows more about the physical and technical features of the painting than any other expert. In her conservation report, Eva is unequivocal. She positively identified the monogram of Ozias Humphry and describes the painting as ‘probably the authentic painting of Jane Austen’. You might think that the National Portrait Gallery would be interested in her expert opinion but they were not. An invitation to view the portrait at Eva’s studio was turned down and when she sent her report to the NPG they said only that her report would be ‘added to the material in the Heinz Archive and Library.’ When a delegation from the NPG finally viewed the Rice Portrait in 2017, they did not ask Eva Schwan, who was present, a single question about the painting or her work on it.

You can read Eva’s full conservation report HERE.

In addition to the conservation report, Eva Schwan also wrote a report specifically about the monogram of Ozias Humphry, which she had identified on the painting. As noted above, this monogram had been detected by Conall Macfarlane of Christie’s in 1985, but subsequent heavy-handed restorations had rather obscured it. In her report, The Revealed Monogram, Eva Schwan explains how her cleaning revealed the monogram of Ozias Humphry in the left lower corner of the painting.

In 2018 Eva Schwan supplied a further report in which she stated that in her expert opinion the Rice Portrait dated to the late Eighteenth Century. See HERE.

Forensic Expert

stephen cole

Acumé Forensic are one of the leading digital forensic companies in the UK, with an international reputation in digital enhancement and are leaders in their field. Before co-founding Acumé Forensic in 2004, Stephen Cole worked for West Yorkshire Police Imaging Unit for 18 years as an Imaging Specialist. He therefore has 30 years of experience in this area.

Stephen was asked to analyse glass negatives of photographs taken in 1910 of the Rice Portrait. You can read more about this in the Photographic Evidence Section. The National Portrait Gallery refused access to the negatives, which they hold in their archive, and supplied a photograph of them instead. From this photograph Stephen Cole was able to identify the words ‘Ozias Humphry’ and ‘Jane Austen’. In October 2019 the National Portrait Gallery finally agreed to allow Stephen Cole access to the original glass negatives rather than a photograph of them, from which Stephen is now working. All the work Stephen has carried out on the plates has been without recompense. You can read Stephen’s full report HERE or by clicking on the image above.

Academic Experts

Claudia JOhnson

Claudia Johnson is Murray Professor of English Literature at Princeton University and was Chair of the English Department from 2004-2012. She specialises in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century literature, in particular novels of that period. She teaches on Jane Austen and has written several books on Austen including Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures, The Blackwell Companion to Jane Austen and Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. She has also prepared editions of Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice.

Professor Johnson has long been a supporter of the Rice Portrait. In 1998, her article Fair Maid of Kent was published in the Times Literary Supplement. In this article she explains how Austen scholar Robert Chapman and later, Deirdre Le Faye, both acted as self-appointed guardians of Jane Austen’s image, ‘by seeing to it that only certain images of Austen gained currency’. She points out that most biographies underplayed Jane Austen’s great-uncle Francis Austen’s importance as a patron of Jane’s family. In August 2013 Jane Austen to the Life, was published in the Times Literary Supplement. Claudia has also written many letters and articles and lectured on the Rice Portrait and we cannot overstate how grateful we are for her support and her courage in standing up for the truth when the painting was under attack by detractors who were determined to undermine the reputation of the painting.

Marilyn Butler

Professor Marilyn Speers Butler, who died in 2014, was an outstanding scholar. She was the first Regius Professor of English at Cambridge University and later Rector of Exeter College, Oxford. A leading Austen scholar, as her obituaries record, including this one in The Independent and this one in The Guardian, her groundbreaking work, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, was the first to place Austen’s novels in historical context. She also edited the works of Austen’s contemporary, Maria Edgeworth, a writer whom Austen greatly admired, and with Janet Todd also edited the works of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Marilyn Butler was a great supporter of the Rice Portrait. In her book, Jane Austen, part of the Very Interesting People series, she wrote positively in favour of the Rice Portrait being of Jane Austen by Ozias Humphry and we are greatly indebted to Professor Butler and to her son, Ed Butler, for their support.

Margaret hammond

Austen scholar Margaret C. Hammond was a longstanding and stalwart supporter of the Rice Portrait until her death in 2006. Margaret Hammond carried out a great deal of research into the wider Austen family, including the Rice family. Her book, Relating to Jane, published in 1998, included a great deal of information about Jane Austen’s niece, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Austen Knight, who married Edward Royds Rice in 1818 and their descendants and included a chapter on A Portrait of Jane Austen in which she outlined the evidence in favour of the portrait. She also criticised the opinion of costume experts whose judgements ‘seem to have been based on an inexplicably small selection of comparable portraits, perversely chosen from the early nineteenth century.’

SUMMARY

We are also indebted to many other individuals who have spoken out in favour of the Rice Portrait, in particular author Jane Odiwe who has covered the story in detail on her own website; Hazel Mills and the Cambridge branch of the Jane Austen Society who invited us to talk about the Rice Portrait and where the painting was publicly displayed for the first time since its restoration and award-winning BBC presenter, producer and journalist Ed Butler, who has written many articles and letters to the National Portrait Gallery, supporting the Rice Portrait.