Jane Austen Society of Australia

Could this be ‘Our Jane’, at last?

English forensic artist Melissa Dring has painted a portrait of Jane Austen, based on Cassandra’s portrait and written recollections of the author. The picture was commissioned by the Jane Austen Centre in Bath to commemorate Austen’s arrival there in 1801 and was unveiled at the Centre on 16 December 2002.

Needless to say, this portrait has already sparked a lot of discussion (and not just in English, so far there are web sites about it in Hungarian, Swedish and French). How close can it be? How modern should it be? and just plain, How dare they? are whizzing around the world, and will probably never be settled, as taste is always a matter of taste.

The portrait shows a much darker and more highly-coloured woman than we are used to, with flashing eyes, a knowing look and apple-red cheeks. It’s a shock at first, we are so used to Cassandra’s pale and pinch-faced spinster that it is hard to accept this sparkling Jane who looks as though her tongue would be as tart as apples as well.

Yet her nephew James-Edward Austen-Leigh (son of Jane’s brother James) described her as: ‘In complexion she was a clear brunette with a rich colour; she had full round cheeks, with mouth and nose small and well formed bright hazel eyes, and brown hair forming natural curls close round her face.’ Other descriptions usually call her at least ‘pretty’ and usually mention her hazel eyes (dare we say ‘fine eyes’?).

The portrait is in strongly coloured pastels (Dring’s speciality), which makes it seem more modern, and this hasn’t been universally popular. No one is pretending that this is a contemporary-to-Jane piece, but still it seems confronting to have washed-out Jane suddenly thrust forward into a world of colour and brightness like this. This will just have to remain a personal taste for people – do we leave Jane in the half-world of lady-like shadow, do we let her into our modern world to be read but not red, or do we go the whole hog and make her as close as possible to what she might have been, as Dring has done?

The pose is also modern-looking, the subject leans forward, resting her cheek on her left hand. We are used to late-18th century and early-19th century portraits, where ‘young ladies’ sit back and look demure, usually with their hands discreetly on their laps. They don’t look as though they have a twinkle in their eyes and are in the middle of a conversation with someone just out of sight. Again, perhaps a matter of personal taste.

And just who does Dring think she is anyway to do this? Although she is not well-known here, Dring is actually well qualified for the job. She trained at the Royal Academy Schools, London as a portrait painter and as a Police Forensic artist with the FBI in Washington, USA. She has a BSc Hons in Psychology of Facial Identification and does freelance work for police forces throughout the UK.

When she got the commission for this picture, she looked at Cassandra’s pictures (the portrait and the ‘back’ view), and read all the known family and friend writings about Austen. From that she has produced a picture that conforms to written descriptions, and looks enough like Cassan-dra’s to suggest that they are the same person drawn by people of differing artistic abilities.

The picture will now hang in the Jane Austen Centre in Bath. The Austen Centre is inviting comment on curator@janeausten.co.uk.

[One member has voiced a particularly strong view querying how ‘what one writes can reveal how one looks’, feeling that the commissioned artist has achieved what looks like ‘a good-humoured dypsomaniac (red nose as well as red cheeks)’. The member adds: ‘Oddly enough, my first thought was that in ways it is probably a fairly good idea of what Mrs Austen looked like! Another view calls it ‘mischievous-looking’!]

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13 July 2003

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