Anne Boleyn's image problem

Dark or brunette? Fair or swarthy? A paragon of beauty or a refined charmer? Our picture of Henry VIII's ill-fated second queen has become distorted over five centuries - but new research by Owen Emmerson and others comes closer to revealing her true appearance

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Close your eyes and picture Anne Boleyn. Chances are you can conjure up a pretty clear and detailed image in your imagination-because few figures in English history seem as visually familiar as Henry VIII's second queen.

Representations of her face appear everywhere: in films, television dramas and novels, in museum gift shops and digital reconstructions. She is often depicted in popular culture as an elegant brunette whose sophistication distinguishes her from others at court. Over time, this image has hardened into something close to fact. Anne Boleyn, we are told, was devastatingly beautiful.

Yet this certainty is built on fragile foundations, and surviving evidence provides a less concrete understanding of Anne's appearance. No formal painted portraits from life survive today, though images in a number of smaller, more intimate formats particularly miniatures - are candidates for having captured her true likeness based on contemporary encounters. The morefamiliar portraits featuring the now-iconic 'B' pendant necklace, meanwhile, were likely created decades later, influenced by politics, artistic convention and hindsight.

For generations, historians assumed that any accurate representations created during Anne's life had been lost altogether, erased after her execution in 1536 on the orders of Henry VIII. That story is compelling, but it is wrong. My research - which underpins Capturing a Queen: The Image of Anne Boleyn, a new exhibition at Anne's childhood home, Hever Castle - suggests that her true likeness remained visible long after her dramatic death.