I just received some exciting news from London about the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust unveiling a portrait of Shakespeare reported to have been painted in his lifetime.
A portrait painted 400 years ago and kept anonymously in an Irish home for much of the time since is now believed to be the only painting of William Shakespeare created during his lifetime.
The image reveals a wealthy Shakespeare of high social status, contradicting the popular view of a struggling playwright of humble status, according to Stanley Wells a professor who chairs London's Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Wells, a distinguished Shakespeare scholar, arranged for three years of research and scientific testing which confirmed it was painted around 1610 when Shakespeare would have been 46 years old. "A rather young looking 46, it has to be said," Wells remarked. Shakespeare died in 1616.
Professor Stanley Wells was one of the keynote speakers at the English Speaking Union International Conference in Edinbrough last year, attended by several Queen Anne residents and ESU members.
The Cobbe portrait-named after the Irish family that owns the painting-shows Shakespeare with rosy cheeks, a full head of hair and a reddish brown beard. The most common portrait of Shakespeare is a gray image showing a bald Bard with a small mustache and beard and bags under his eyes.
The identity of the man in the portrait was lost over the centuries-until Alec Cobbe saw a portrait from Washington's Folger Shakespeare Library. That painting, which fell into disfavor as a Shakespeare portrait about 70 years ago, turned out to be one of four copies of Cobbe's portrait.
The portrait "shows a man wearing expensive costuming, including a very beautifully pleated ruff of Italian lacework which would have been very expensive," Wells said. It establishes, for me, that Shakespeare in his later years was rather wealthy, affluent member of aristocratic circles in the society of his time." he said.
"There's been too much of a tendency to believe that Shakespeare, being the son of a glover, coming from a small town in the middle of England, that he necessarily retained a rather humble status throughout his life." Wells reads even more into what he sees in Shakespeare's newly-found face. "I think it's plausible as a portrait as a good listener, of somebody who would have been capable of writing the plays, clearly a man of high intelligence," he said. "It's the face of a man, I think, who betrays a good deal of wisdom in his features. But, of course, as somebody (King Duncan) says in Shakespeare's story Macbeth, "there's no art to find the minds construction in the face."
It should be noted that Shakespeare's King Duncan paid a price for judging Macbeth to have the face of an honorable man. Macbeth later murdered the king.
The public can read Shakespeare's face from the original painting at Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon where it goes on display for several months starting April 23.
The portrait returns to the Cobbe family, which inherited it when an ancestor married England's Earl of Southampton-a friend of Shakespeare's who likely commissioned its painting.
To date we have only three accepted images of Shakespeare of which the Chandos portrait is the most familiar. Originally belonging to the second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos with the following list of impressive names; Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville.
In 1839, he officially inherited the title with a grand mansion in Stow in Buckinghamshire with the distinction of having nine of the first flush toilets designed by Thomas Crapper and a huge fortune which he managed to loose by a lot of very unsound investments. Bankrupt and discredited he escaped to France in 1848 leaving Stow and its fabulous contents for disposal by his creditors.
The public auction became the social event of the age. There were so many fabulous treasures that it took a team of auctioneers from the firm of Christie and Mason over 40 days to dispose of it all. Among the lesser-noted items was a dark oval portrait, twenty-two inches high by eighteen wide, purchased by the Earl of Ellesmere for 355 guineas and known ever since as the Chandos portrait. The painting had been much retouched and blackened with time. It shows a balding but not unhandsome man of about forty who sports a trim beard. In his left ear he wears a gold earring. In 1856, shortly before his death, Lord Ellesmere gave the painting to the new National Portrait Gallery in London.
As the gallery's first acquisition, it had a certain prestige, but almost at once its authenticity was doubted. Many critics at the time thought the subject was too dark-skinned and foreign looking-too Italian or Jewish-to be England's greatest poet. The painting was authenticated from the right period. The collar is of a type that was popular between about 1590 and 1610, just when Shakespeare was having his greatest success and thus most likely to sit for a portrait. We can also tell that the subject was a bit bohemian, which would seem consistent with a theatrical career, and that he was at least fairly well to do, as Shakespeare would have been in this period. The earring tells us he was a bit bohemian. An earring on a man meant the same then as it does now-that the wearer was making a statement. Drake and Raleigh were both painted with earrings. It was their way of announcing that they were of an adventurous disposition. The subject wished to give the impression of prosperity by being dressed all in black. It takes a great deal of dye to make fabric really black. It was much cheaper to produce clothes that were fawn or beige. Black clothes in the 16th century were always a sign of prosperity.
If the Chandos portrait is not genuine, then we are left with two other possible likenesses to help decide what William Shakespeare looked like. The first is the copperplate engraving that appeared as the frontispiece of the collected works of Shakespeare in 1623-the famous First Folio. The Droeshout engraving, as it is known is considered a mediocre piece of work. Droeshout (or Drussoit, as he was sometimes known in his own time) was a Flemish artist. Peter W. M. Blayney, the leading authority on the First Folio has suggested that Droeshout, who was in his early twenties and not very experienced when he executed the work, may have won the commission not because he was an accomplished artist but because he owned the right piece of equipment: a rolling press of the type needed for copperplate engravings. Few artists had such a device in the 1620's.
Despite its many shortcomings, the engraving comes with a poetic endorsement from Ben Johnson, who says of it in his memorial to Shakespeare in the First Folio:
O, could he but have drawne his wit
As well in brasse, as he hath hit
His face, the Print would then surpasse
All that was ever writ in brasse.
What is certain is that the Droeshout portrait was not done from life. Shakespeare had been dead for 7 years by the time the First Folio was published.
That leaves us with the third possibility. The life size statue that forms the centerpiece of a wall monument to Shakespeare at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he is buried. Like the Droeshout, it is an indifferent piece of work artistically, executed by a mason named Gheerart Janssen and installed in the chancel of the church by 1623. He portrays Shakespeare as a puffy-faced, self-satisfied figure, with (as Mark Twain memorably put it) the "deep, deep, subtle, subtle expression of a bladder," but let us remember that Mark Twain was no fan of Shakespeare.
This is why this new find is so important. There will always be dissenters but Shakespeare's works will continue to survive as the finest body of work in the English language and needs no biographical explanation except to say "thanks, thanks, and forever thanks." (Twelfth Night)
Fare thee well and TTFN until next time.
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