William Warman Portrait of a Woman in a Bonnet

William Warman (1806–1875)

This fine portrait is one of a small collection of works by William Warman (1806–1875) that we have for sale. Little is documented about William Warman but he was certainly a professional portraitist working in the early and mid-19th century. There is a watercolour portrait by him of Queen Victoria in the National Portrait Gallery in London (NPG 1891a), which is a reduced copy after Thomas Sully. A lithograph print by Warman in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (WAHP9819.2) suggests that his portraits were reproduced as book illustrations.

Three of the portraits in the present collection are historical figures of the Tudor period—Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and Lady Jane Grey—and as such, they are recognisable portrait 'types'—with a place in the centuries-long history of accepted authentic likenesses of these figures. Whilst portraits of people pre-dating the Tudor period were largely fictional, in the 16th century the concept of a ‘true likeness’ became increasingly important and antiquarian sources, such as coins, tomb monuments and illuminated manuscripts, were consulted in the making of painted and printed portraits of historical figures. Prints became more readily available and the resulting portrait 'types' became standardised—so that in subsequent centuries, through to the present day, our idea of what these historical figures looked like is limited to a few key images. Warman's paintings are no doubt taken from earlier works which have circulated as prints, such as Holbein's iconic lost portrait of Henry VIII.

During the Victorian era there was great public interest in Henry VIII's six wives and figures like Lady Jane Grey, whose lives were romanticised, so Warman's portraits, although historical, would have been very much in vogue.