The "Streatham" portrait is an oil painting on panel from the 1590s believed to be a later copy of a woodcut of the English noblewoman Lady Jane Grey from 1580.^[1][2][3] It shows a three-quarter-length depiction of a young woman in Tudor-period dress holding a prayer book, with the faded inscription "Lady Jayne" or "Lady Iayne" in the upper-left corner. It is in poor condition and damaged, as if it has been attacked. As of January 2015^[update] the portrait is in Room 3 of the National Portrait Gallery in London.

The work is thought to have been completed as part of a set of paintings of Protestant martyrs. It was in the possession of a collector in Streatham, London, by the early 20th century. In December 2005 the portrait was examined by the art dealer Christopher Foley. He saw it as an accurate, though poorly executed, reproduction of a contemporary painting of Jane, had it verified and on that basis negotiated its sale. The work was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in London for a rumoured £100,000. The historian David Starkey was highly critical of the sale and challenged Foley's identifications.

Lady Jane Grey was the great-granddaughter of King Henry VII through his youngest daughter, Mary, and first cousin once removed of King Edward VI. After Edward's death, a Protestant faction proclaimed her queen on 10 July 1553 over his Catholic half-sister, Mary. Nine days later, Mary successfully claimed the throne and Jane was imprisoned in the Tower of London on charges of high treason, along with her husband, Lord Guildford Dudley. Jane's trial was conducted in November, but her sentence of death was suspended. In February 1554, Jane's father, the Duke of Suffolk, who had been pardoned, participated in Wyatt's rebellion. On 12 February, Mary had Jane, then aged 16 or 17, and her husband beheaded; Jane's father suffered the same fate eleven days later.^[4]

Jane was a devout Protestant during the English Reformation, when the Church of England violently rejected the authority of the pope and the Roman Catholic Church. Known for her piety and education, she corresponded with Protestant leaders in Continental Europe, such as Heinrich Bullinger. A modest person who dressed plainly, her last words before her execution are reported as "Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit!"^[5] Jane's execution by a Catholic queen made her into what the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography terms a "Protestant martyr",^[5] and by the end of the century Jane had become, in the words of the historian Eric Ives, "a Protestant icon".^[6] Depictions of Jane in the 16th and 17th centuries, such as in John Foxe's Actes and Monuments (1563), published after Protestant Elizabeth I took the throne, "presented [Jane] as primarily a figure in a national narrative about an elect nation possessed of a pure Protestant faith which had risen supreme over Catholic Europe".^[7]

Jane was long thought to be the only 16th-century English monarch without a surviving contemporary portrait; one was documented in a 1590 inventory, but is now considered lost.^[8] Some identified as her were later deemed to be of other sitters, such as one of Catherine Parr, the last of the six wives of Henry VIII, which was identified as Lady Jane Grey until 1996.^{[lower-alpha 1]} Other works, such as The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833) by Paul Delaroche, were painted years or centuries after her death.^[9] As a result, Cynthia Zarin of The New Yorker writes, "the blank where [Jane's] face should be has made it that much easier for succeeding generations to imprint their political and personal fantasies on her".^[8]

The three-quarter-length portrait measures 85.6 cm × 60.3 cm (33.7 in × 23.7 in), and is painted with oil on Baltic oak.^[10] A faded inscription, reading "Lady Jayne"^[11] or "Lady Iayne",^[6] is in the upper-left corner, above the woman's shoulders.^{[lower-alpha 2][12]} The sitter is described by art critic Charlotte Higgins as a slender and "demure, pious young woman", and has been tentatively identified as Lady Jane Grey.^[13] Ives notes a familial resemblance between the sitter and Grey's sisters, Catherine and Mary, which "may give conjectural support" to the identification of Grey.^[6]

The subject wears an opulent red gown with turned-back trumpet sleeves and a partlet with standing collar; the latter is embroidered with a fleur-de-lis pattern, the heraldic emblem of French royalty. The design on her underskirt shows a pattern variously identified as strawberries, gilliflowers, Scots thistles or pinks; the last of these was an emblem of the Grey family. A French hood on her head covers most of her red hair. She wears numerous pieces of jewellery, including a necklace finished with medallions and pearls; these indicate a person of high social and economic status, which is reinforced by the silk and velvet of her gown. The sitter is not, however, wearing a wedding ring, suggesting she was not yet married.^[14] Instead she is holding a prayer book.^[13] This type of costume was popular during the Tudor period, particularly in the 1550s, and the accuracy of its depiction has been used to advance the portrait's authenticity as a depiction of Jane Grey.^[15]

The independent historian J. Stephan Edwards writes, however, that the fleur-de-lis give him pause as, before June 1553, Jane "would have had no right to the French heraldic emblems" as she was not yet an heir to the throne.^[14] After the discovery of an inscribed portrait of Catherine Parr, in 2014 Edwards published a tentative identification of said painting as the original on which the Streatham portrait was based. He wrote that the Parr painting had been "adapted to 'become' Jane Grey in the absence of an accessible authentic portrait" in the Streatham portrait and similar, supporting this with an analysis of the similar styles of dress and the jewellery (including a necklace of festooned pearls).^[14]

Reception of the painting as a work of art has been predominantly negative. The historian David Starkey described it as "an appallingly bad picture and there's absolutely no reason to suppose it's got anything to do with Lady Jane Grey",^[16] a sentiment which the art dealer Christopher Foley rejected.^[8] Tarnya Cooper of the National Portrait Gallery gave less sharp criticism, stating "it's a paint-by-number, labored copy",^[17] and "its value is as a historical document rather than a work of art".^[16] Zarin describes the painting as looking bleached in comparison with other portraits of monarchs, with "the flat face of a paper doll".^[17] Edwards writes "the quality might be described as naive, primitive, or even folk art".^[14]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Streatham portrait.

• Streatham Worthies, a circle of literary and cultural figures from Streatham commemorated by a series of portraits by Joshua Reynolds