Portrait of Edward VI, attributed to William Scots c. 1550, hanging at Hampton Court Palace. Photo May 2015.
I haven’t done a whole lot of portraits as Pictures of the Week yet, but I got a number of decent photos of paintings at Hampton Court Palace last year so I’m going to start using some going forward. This one is of the birthday boy, Edward VI, born 479 years ago today!
It looks like some sort of note (or inscription) is thumbtacked to the marble scenery behind him … any ideas what it says? I did some Googling and couldn’t find anything for this particular painting, although apparently there are variations of it by Scrots and his imitators that have different notations on them. In discussing the variations, there were suggestions that this representation of Edward was created for the marriage negotiations with France, so I was wondering if the Post-It might relate to that.
I finally had a chance this afternoon to go back and look at the original resolution image, but unfortunately I couldn’t make out what it said. So I decided to check the Royal Collection website and they not only had the image in the collections database, but they had a hi-res image that I was able to screen-cap:
(if that doesn’t embed, you can see it here: http://tudorhistory.org/blogpics/kingedward.png)
Looks like ‘King Edward’ (although maybe spelled ‘kyng’ or ‘kynge’?).
That was fun to hunt down – I definitely don’t get enough opportunities to do some history detective work these days…
Hmm – no Da Vinci code-style mystery, though, in that inscription! Thanks for taking the time and checking it out.
Yeah, I was hoping for at least some kind of Latin motto, but no, it was boringly straightforward. 🙂