LONDON, March 24 (UPI) -- A disputed portrait of the writer Jane Austen is to be sold in the United States because the British National Portrait Gallery refuses to accept it as genuine.
Henry Rice, a retired farmer from Kent and descendant of Jane Austen's brother, Edward, has offered the portrait to the gallery and been turned down, the Daily Telegraph reported. He said that the U.S. art world is more "receptive" to arguments that the picture is genuine, which is why it is to be auctioned next month at Christie's in New York.
"This picture has never left our family and has always been a portrait of Jane," Rice told the newspapers. "Effectively we have been called liars."
The portrait shows a girl in her early teens wearing a white dress and holding a green parasol. It was used in 1884 as the frontispiece for a collection of Jane Austen letters.
The National Portrait Gallery once tried to buy the picture from Rice's father. But in 1948 an Austen scholar said that the dress in the picture dated from 1805 when Jane Austen would have been 30 and argued that the portrait depicts a cousin, Jane Motley Austen.
