CERL Thesaurus

Portrait of unknown female formerly misattributed as Horatia Nelson. Royal Museums Greenwich have stated, "we no longer think the woman in white is Horatia. She has some likeness to Nelson, but Horatia did not have such a marked resemblance from other portraits of her in youth (we have a bust by Christopher Prosperi showing her as a child and an oil portrait of her in early teens)Where this identification started is not clear: the provenance of the item stops with its exhibition in 1889 when in the hands of a Bond Street dealer and the only link with the Nelson-Ward family is that they had a copy of made, probably at that time and relying on his identification of it, not theirs. There is, so far, no evidence it was ever in Nelson-Ward family possession (or other branches of the Nelson family), which is the obvious place to have expected to find it, or at least information linking it to them - but there is none."