“We dont know who painted the portrait, or where, when or for whom, but the point of it is Barbara’s dignity,” Angela McShane, Wellcome’s research development manager, said. She is dressed is in the highest fashion of the day and contemporary viewers would have recognised that.”Samuel Pepys, Evelyn’s contemporary and friend, also met a bearded woman in London in 1668. Some historians believe it was the same person, but McShane thinks this was another woman with a different condition. This is an elegant entertainment for aristocrats.”The Wellcome Collection, which already has five prints of the same woman, has identified the condition as a very rare congenital endocrine condition known as hypertrichosis or Ambras Syndrome. The portrait of Van Beck is of such high quality that McShane wonders if it could have been in the collection at some point after Ferdinand’s death.

Source: The Guardian December 14, 2017 00:00 UTC