Mystery sitter in Holbein portrait could be Anne Boleyn, AI analysis finds

They are two small sketches by the Renaissance master Hans Holbein: one has long been considered to be a portrait of Henry VIII’s doomed second wife, Anne Boleyn, and the other is of an unknown woman whose name was lost to time.Now researchers using AI have discovered that the unnamed woman might be the tragic queen after all, while the other figure could in fact be Boleyn’s mother.The works, which belong to the Royal Collection and are known as the Windsor sketch and the Unidentified Woman, respectively, were analysed by a team at the University of Bradford, who found that they might have been incorrectly inscribed in the 1700s, leading to a misunderstanding that has lasted centuries.The Windsor sketch. Illustration: Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2026 | Royal Collection TrustThe independent scholar Karen Davies was studying the Holbein corpus of images, which number more than 80, and had her suspicions about the Windsor sketch, which shows the sitter in side profile. She was light-skinned, with red hair, while Boleyn was often described as being of a darker complexion.The corpus was also known for its inconsistent labelling, with an image of Boleyn’s cousin Henry Howard actually being of his father. In a