Social media isn’t all doom, gloom and showing off - sometimes it can lead to historical discoveries.
Fine art researcher Adam Busiakiewicz was simply browsing X (formerly Twitter) earlier this month when, somewhat remarkably, he spotted a famous portrait of King Henry VIII that was long considered lost.
In fact, it had been hiding in plain sight all along.
In his blog, Busiakiewicz explained he was “scrolling at speed” but paused when he stumbled upon a photo of the Judges’ Drawing Room of Warwick Old Shire Hall -posted by the Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire - a regional representative of the British Crown.
The blog relates that "I by chance spotted a portrait of Henry VIII with a distinctive arched top in a photo of a room in Warwick Shire Hall" on the wall in the background, and it reminded him of a series of portraits commissioned by a local politician and tapestry maker during the 1590s. These paintings were later dispersed at auction and 'disappeared'.
"I had the pleasure of researching a picture from this dispersed group whilst at Sotheby’s in the 2023," he writes.
After sharing his theory, Busiakiewicz saw the painting up close at Warwick’s Shire Hall and told CNN “there’s no doubt” it’s a match to the lost Henry VIII portrait. “Social media is a crazy thing,” Busiakiewicz said, “because some people use it to watch cat videos and follow what’s going on in the world, and then people like me just look at what people have hanging on their walls.”
ArtUK records that the Warwick Shire Hall painting of Henry VIII was purchased in 1951, presumably as part of the County Council’s attempts to aggrandise their historic properties with handsome historic portraits of Kings and Queens.