A portrait drawing of an unidentified woman. A bust length portrait facing to the front. The drawing has been cut along the contours of the headdress and shoulders and pasted to a new sheet of primed paper. Annotated by the artist: Samat (velvet) and Damast (damask). 

The paper is watermarked with a two-handled pot (a variant of number 12863 in Briquet's catalogue of watermarks). The paper is inscribed twice on the verso: 'hans holbein' (in ink) and '[?] hans holbein' (in chalk)

As has been noted by a number of authors, this and two other drawings which have been trimmed around the edges (in the British Museum and the Louvre) were in the collection of Jonathan Richardson the Elder. Since Richardson did not routinely trim his drawings it seems likely that this was done by another, unidentified, collector before the three drawings were acquired by Richardson.

The drawing has largely been published as the portrait of an unknown lady. The sitter was identified as Anne of Cleves by John Chamberlaine, keeper of George III's drawings and medals: 'this drawing of Anne of Cleve was bought at Dr Mead's sale in 1755, by Walter Chetwynd, fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and was delivered by the executors of that gentleman to Benjamin Way, Esquire, of Denham in Bucks, who lately had the honour of receiving his Majesty's permission to add it to the Royal Collection' (J. Chamberlaine, Imitations of Original Drawings by Hans Holbein in the Collection of His Majesty, 1792).

Chamberlaine's suggestion that the drawing showed Anne of Cleves was followed by Richard Holmes in a volume on the drawings illustrated with photographs by Franz Hanfstaengl (undated, but c.1900) and in the New Gallery exhibition The House of Tudor in 1890. Karl Parker, however, observed in his catalogue of the Holbein drawings at Windsor that 'there is only the frontal pose in common between the drawing and the Queen's portrait of 1539 in the Louvre'.

In 1867, Ralph Wornum suggested in Some Account of the Life and Work of Hans Holbein (1867) that the sitter is Amelia of Cleves. In Holbein at the Tudor Court (2024) it was suggested that the subject may be Mary Howard, Duchess of Richmond and Somerset, who is also the subject of RCIN 912212. No conclusive evidence about the sitter's identity is available, however, and any identification must remain speculative.

See also: 
Lois Oliver et al 'New evidence towards an attribution to Holbein of a drawing in the Victoria and Albert Museum', The Burlington Magazine, March 2006, pp. 168-172