Harriet Green As Anne Boleyn In Six Queens Of Henry VIII.

Harriet Green as Anne Boleyn in Six Queens of Henry VIII.

The christening of lady Elizabeth, daughter to King Henry VIII., the 25th year of his reign, A.D. 1533.

On Sept 7, between three and four o'clock p.m., the Queen was delivered of a fair lady, for whom Te Deum was incontinently sung. The mayor, Sir Stephen Pecock, with his brethren and 40 of the chief citizens, were ordered to be at the christening on the Wednesday following ; on which day the mayor and council, in scarlet, with their collars, rowed to Greenwich, and the citizens went in another barge.

Natalie Portman as Anne Boleyn in The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)

Frank Cadogan Cowper (1877-1958), The Blue Bird, 1918, oil on canvas, 88.4 x 71.1 cm. In a private collection. - The Blue Bird appeared at the Royal Academy in 1918, the last year of the Great War. Military images dominated the exhibition and the picture must have struck an incongruous note amid the portraits of generals, tributes to indomitable Tommies, romanticised accounts of ‘bringing up the guns’, and poignant war memorials. There seems to be no iconographical connection with Maurice Maeterlinck’s play The Blue Bird, although Cowper must have been aware of the phenomenally successful staging of this 'transcendental pantomime’ at the Haymarket Theatre, London, in 1909-11. The costumes and sets were by Frederick Cayley Robinson, who also illustrated the text when it was published by Methuen in 1911.

The picture does, however, undoubtedly relate to Madame d'Aulnoy’s fairy tale of the same name, first published in 1697. This tells of a beautiful young princess, Fiordelisa, who falls in love with a handsome prince. He returns her love, but her wicked step-mother, wanting him to marry her own ill-favoured daughter, Turritella, shuts her up in a tower and attempts to blacken her name with her suitor. When the prince, refusing to marry Turritella, is transformed into a Blue Bird by her fairy godmother, he flies to the tower and holds amorous tête-à-têtes with Fiordelisa, bringing her presents of jewels as tokens of his affection. Cowper shows the lovers enjoying one of these trysts, the princess holding a rope of pearls that the Blue Bird has evidently just given her. 

Sketch for A Mermaid, 1892, John William Waterhouse

Medium: oil,canvas

history + red haired queens*. (requested by anonymous). * “bonus challenge, try to limit the amount of Tudors”.