The debate about what Anne Boleyn actually looked like has raged for many years and I think will continue to do so as no contemporary portrait of Anne survived.
The other issue is that many of the contemporary descriptions of Anne were written during her relationship to the King and so, as Eric Ives says, are ‘already coloured by the controversy surrounding her relationship with the king’ (p.39). Hostile observers skewed their descriptions to serve a political purpose. Antonia Fraser calls it ‘venomous propaganda’ (Fraser, p. 122).
I have collected the following quotes about Anne’s appearance, qualities and demeanour from Eric Ives’ The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, Alison Weir’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII , Antonia Fraser’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Josephine Wilkinson’s The Early Loves of Anne Boleyn, in the hope of piecing together an accurate portrait of Anne.
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