The Many Faces of Jane
Several Alert Janeites, including Sandra, Lois, Amanda, Julie, and Arwen, sent us an article about the “Rice Portrait,” which is being auctioned at Christie’s next month as a portrait of Jane Austen. The Rice Portrait certainly is not, as the headline of the article claims, the only known portrait of Jane Austen; that title properly belongs to the portrait by Cassandra Austen owned by the National Portrait Gallery in London. The provenance of the Rice portrait has been disputed by Austen scholars for years.
Depicting a girl of about 15 standing in a landscape, clad in a white dress and holding a green parasol, the painting is believed to have been commissioned around 1790 by Austen’s great-uncle Francis.
“People who knew her — nephews and nieces — say it’s her,” said Piers Davies, an expert in old master paintings at Christie’s. “It is a compelling image.”
More compelling still is the seller: Henry Rice, who is related to Austen through her third brother, Edward. “I inherited the portrait from my father, who died in 1973, and it has always been in my family,” Mr. Rice said in a telephone interview from his home in West Dorset, England. “All the arguments that it is not of Austen are very weak.”
JASNA News published an article about it a few years back, about which the Editrix wrote at her personal weblog.
I saw Cassandra’s miniature last year when the National Portrait Gallery’s Regency collection was sent on a tour of the U.S. while that wing of the gallery was being renovated. It was totally worth seven hours of driving in one day to get to the Yale Center for British Art to see it. We got to stand with our faces about six inches away from the little painting and really look it over. I’ve never understood the visceral hatred for that portrait amongst Janeites. So Jane looks cranky. I can tell you that the drawing, to me, appears unfinished; perhaps Jane grew tired of sitting for it, perhaps Cassandra got fed up with her crankiness and completed the miniature with a few strokes of her pencil and a wash of watercolors; but I can tell you that the face, eyes, nose and hair are finished in astonishingly minute and beautiful detail, detail that doesn’t come across in photographs. Cassandra was a skilled miniaturist; had she finished that portrait of Jane, we would need no other.
Short version: we don’t buy it. It’s a definite maybe, but still a maybe as far as we are concerned. Your mileage, of course, may vary. 
We also would like to point out that the National Portrait Gallery is hardly making a killing off Cassandra’s portrait, as we purchased a humongous poster-sized version in the Gallery gift shop for the princely sum of one pound.
We have long suspected that the dislike of and refusal to accept Cassandra’s portrait as “definitive” and the search for anything better is a bit of Jane-love run amok. The impulse is not terrible. We Janeites want to believe that Jane Austen was a pretty woman; it is the most natural instinct in the world. However, as Jane herself said, she did not write for such dull elves as have not a good imagination themselves. Can’t we accept Cassandra’s portrait, and just imagine that face lit by humor and animation and color? Are we, as Janeites, such pictures of intellectual poverty?
All that being said, we wish the owner much luck in disposing of the portrait for a good price. We’ve seen much uglier stuff on Antiques Roadshow valued for tens of thousands of dollars.
This brings us back to one of yesterday’s topics, the “prettier” portrait of Jane Austen commissioned by Wordsworth Books. Alert Janeite Laurie sent us an article from the Beeb about the Wordsworth portrait and the Rice Portrait, which reveals that the book for which the portrait will be used is a new edition of J.E. Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of his aunt. (You know you can read it online for free, right? And even download it as an e-book in a variety of formats. Just saying.)
