When the Windsor sketch has been discussed as a possible likeness of Anne Boleyn, it has been suggested that Francesco Bartolozzi’s 1797 colour stipple engraving offers visual evidence that the sitter’s hair was originally darker. Because Bartolozzi shows a slightly darker hair colour than is visible on the original Windsor sketch today, the argument goes that he must have been copying pigments Holbein once used, pigments that have since faded.

In this view, Bartolozzi’s print is said to offer a vital clue to a “lost palette.”

But when we look closely at the engraving, it tells a much simpler story.

The brunette or layered pigments said to have faded from the original Windsor sketch do not appear to have been copied at all.

Bartolozzi shows no trace of deeper tones, no “upper layer” of colour, and nothing resembling worn-down brown or black chalk. The engraving does not preserve what is claimed to have vanished; those colours are absent altogether.

Yet he does freely add a warm brown to the fur-trimmed nightgown, even though the Windsor sketch contains no brown in that area at all. This alone shows that Bartolozzi was willing to imagine colour where none existed in the original.

Bartolozzi’s palette is soft, muted, and distinctly eighteenth-century. The hair appears in a clean, delicately stippled shade only slightly darker than blonde, what we would now describe as mouse-brown. This is a gentle, neutral wash chosen for harmony across the plate, not an attempt to preserve vanishing pigments. If Holbein’s original had once carried saturated reds, browns, or blacks, we would expect some echo of that depth. We see none.

And this leads to a more fundamental issue: we do not know what condition the Windsor drawing was in when Bartolozzi saw it. No conservation notes survive. No copyist described its state. There is no evidence of fading, no record of pigment loss, and no documentation that Bartolozzi intended to reproduce original colour. And there is a further difficulty: if these rich pigments were visible enough in 1797 for Bartolozzi to copy them, when did they disappear? The theory requires us to believe that colours which survived more than 260 years from Holbein’s time to Bartolozzi’s then vanished entirely in the better-documented centuries that followed. Without such information, the idea that he “preserved” missing tones rests on inference alone.

What we can say with confidence is that Bartolozzi was producing a work of art, not a technical facsimile. Colour stipple engraving smooths, idealises, and refines by its very nature. The engraver adjusts colour to suit the plate, the inks, and contemporary taste. Bartolozzi was creating a fashionable, elegant object, not a conservation document.

Modern cataloguing reflects this understanding. At the National Portrait Gallery, the engraving is no longer listed as Anne Boleyn at all, but as “Unknown woman formerly known as Anne Boleyn”, NPG D40303, published in 1797.

This modern catalogue description stands in quiet tension with the longstanding Royal Collection attribution of the Windsor drawing as Anne Boleyn, and with the scholars who rely on it.

Perhaps the sitter’s hair was darker.

Perhaps it was not.

But Bartolozzi cannot provide the answer his engraving is being used to give.

What the plate reveals is not a vanished palette but the engraver’s own hand, his own choices, and his own historical moment. When we allow the print to speak for itself, it quietly makes that clear.