Alert Janeite Lisa sent us a blog entry from NBC reporter Lisa Daniels, who did a report on the Rice Portrait auction this morning on the Today Weekend show, in which Ms. Daniels claims to be a big Jane Austen fan. We wonder why she has never heard the term “Janeite” then? And we were further amused at the broadcast, in which the reporter and the JASNA members interviewed talked about Jane’s wonderful writing, illustrated by scenes from various films, all containing dialogue that Jane Austen never wrote (thankfully!). We will keep an eye on the Today Show site, hoping that they put up the video of the piece.

The Guardian also weighs in on the controversy with a more in-depth discussion of the provenance of the portrait than we have seen in the press to date.

The Rice Portrait first came to public notice 14 years after the publication of the Memoir, when it appeared as a frontispiece to the Letters of Jane Austen, edited by Lord Brabourne. The painting had been bequeathed in 1883 to his cousin, John Morland Rice (both men were grandsons of Jane Austen’s brother Edward), by Dr Thomas Harding-Newman, whose stepmother, “a great admirer of the novelist”, had been given it by Colonel Thomas Austen, one of Jane’s cousins. Harding-Newman called it “a painting of Jane Austen the novelist by Zoffany”, an attribution long argued over and now dismissed: the artist is instead thought to be Ozias Humphry (1742-1810), whose monogram on the painting was documented in the 1980s (but which was later erased by an over- enthusiastic cleaning procedure).

Humphry had painted a portrait of Jane’s wealthy great-uncle Francis Austen in 1780 and a portrait of her brother Edward as a young boy (he may also have painted a lifesize portrait of the adult Edward in 1790-91). But is this young girl’s picture from the same period? Costume historian Aileen Ribiero (among others) has said not; the muslin dress falling from below the bust and the cropped hair are styles characteristic of the early 19th century, when Jane was in her thirties. This has been countered by collectors Lillian and Ted Williams, who own “several 18th-century gowns similar to the one pictured in the Rice Portrait”, and by the example of a similarly dressed girl in a portrait of around 1792. Deirdre Le Faye, editor of Austen’s letters, author of Jane Austen: A Family Record and the most damning of the sceptics, believes that the artist was possibly the Reverend Matthew Peters and the subject Thomas Austen’s niece, Mary Ann Campion.

[. . .]

The colonel certainly knew Jane Austen; they were cousins, born the same year, and she mentions him and his first wife Margaretta familiarly in a letter of 1813. If the portrait was of his cousin, Thomas Austen and his wife would have recognised it as such. But did he value it highly - or at all? Deirdre Le Faye imagines that Thomas Austen gave away the portrait, knowing it not to be of his cousin, but passing it off as “Jane Austen” in 1817-18 to please Mrs Harding- Newman, cynically taking “the proverbial view that a nod’s as good as a wink to a blind horse”.

If you are prepared, like Le Faye, to believe this of Colonel Austen, you would have to include his wife Margaretta in the deception. She didn’t die until 1825. The recipient certainly believed it was a portrait of the novelist (and must have been a pretty ardent reader to have been a “fan” of Jane Austen at all by 1817 - the year of Austen’s early death: identification of the author was only known in limited circles since the year or two before then). Of course she might have fantasised the identification at a later date, when Austen’s fame was growing, or simply been mistaken about it, but that would mean that the Austens’ gift in 1817 was a portrait of a subject entirely unknown to the Harding-Newmans, a pretty odd and unsatisfactory wedding-present. It’s possible but seems far less likely than Thomas Austen knowing the painting was of his cousin, yet still giving it away.