The Cobbe original was only identified in the collection of the Anglo-IrishCobbe family in 2006, and had until then been completely unknown to the world. Evidence uncovered by researchers at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust led to the claim, presented in March 2009, that the portrait is of William Shakespeare and painted from life.[1] Many scholars dismiss this theory and have provided evidence to identify the portrait as one of Sir Thomas Overbury.[2]
The portrait has been the centrepiece of two exhibitions dedicated to it: Shakespeare Found: a Life Portrait at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon, from April–October 2009 and The Changing Face of William Shakespeare at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, from February–May 2011. An illustrated catalogue provides details of the painting and its provenance.[3]
Support
Support for the identification is drawn from several strands of evidence:
The portrait descended in the Cobbe family together with a portrait of Shakespeare's patron, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton – the person most likely to have commissioned a portrait of Shakespeare – and they were inherited by Archbishop Cobbe through his cousin's wife, Southampton's great-granddaughter, who inherited Wriothesley heirlooms.
At least five early copies of the Cobbe portrait have long traditions as representing Shakespeare: in the case of one of them, the 'Janssen' portrait in the Folger Shakespeare Library (Washington, D.C.), the tradition is claimed to date to within living memory of Shakespeare. This is one of the longest Shakespeare traditions attaching to any oil portrait. Furthermore, the existence of so many early copies indicates that the sitter was a man of fame.
The Cobbe portrait is inscribed with the words Principum amicitias!, meaning 'the alliances of princes!', a quotation from Horace in an ode addressed to a man who was, among other things, a playwright (see below).
The Cobbe portrait, and even more so the Janssen copy, bears a compositional similarity with the Droeshout engraving published in the First Folio of 1623. The original or copy may have been a source for the engraving.
Scientific testing has shown that the portrait is painted on a panel of English oak sometime after 1595; the form of the collar suggests a painting date of around 1610.
Both the Cobbe portrait and the Janssen copy received alterations, in particular to the hairline.[3] In the Cobbe original, this alteration made the sitter look younger, and the copies of the Cobbe received this younger hairline. The later state of the Janssen was significantly aged compared with either version of the Cobbe, suggesting that the alteration was made either late in the sitter's life or after his death. A second "bald" copy of the Cobbe, originally owned by the Marquess of Dorchester, also exists.[3]
The identification has received support from Shakespeare scholars Stanley Wells, Henry Woudhuysen, Jay L. Halio, Stuart Sillars, and Gregory Doran, chief associate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and art historians Alastair Laing, curator of paintings and sculpture at the National Trust, and Paul Joannides, professor of Art History at Cambridge.
Supporters of the Shakespeare identification reject the arguments for Overbury. Research using tracings by Rupert Featherstone at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge, has led him to conclude that the Cobbe portrait and the only documented portrait of Overbury in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, depict two different sitters.
The Janssen portrait after 1988 restorationThe altered balding hairline in the "original" Janssen portrait, as it appeared when purchased by the Folger Shakespeare Library in the early 1930s
Since the publicity surrounding it, the portrait has appeared on the covers of several books, and even inspired the Chinese author Zhang Yiyi to have a series of cosmetic surgeries to have his face transformed into that of Shakespeare.[4]
Criticism
The claims about the portrait have also met with considerable scepticism from other Shakespeareans and art experts, including Shakespeare scholar and general editor of the Arden Shakespeare David Scott Kastan, who has questioned the portrait's provenance, and Tarnya Cooper, curator of 16th-century portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, who believes that both the Cobbe and Janssen portraits represent Sir Thomas Overbury. Other scholars have noted numerous differences between the Cobbe portrait and the authentic but posthumous Droeshout engraving that appeared in the First Folio of Shakespeare's works.[5]
History
The subject of the portrait was unidentified for centuries after passing into the ownership of the Cobbe family some time in the early 18th century.
In 2006, Alec Cobbe viewed the "Janssen portrait", so-called because it was once attributed to the artist Cornelis Janssen. It belongs to Washington's Folger Shakespeare Library, and was on exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery in London; it bore a striking resemblance to the one owned by his family. The Janssen painting had long been claimed to be Shakespeare. However, the state of the painting that Cobbe viewed was not the one that showed the greatest resemblance to the standard engraved Droeshout image of Shakespeare with a high, balding forehead.[6] The removal of overpainting in 1988 had, in fact, revealed an earlier state with a much younger hairline. Shakespeare's age and date had also been added at some later time.
In the exhibition catalogue the "Janssen portrait" was tentatively identified as a depiction of the courtier, poet and essayist Thomas Overbury. This suggestion dates back to an earlier exhibition in 1964, before the cleaning.[7] Nevertheless, the catalogue asserted that this was simply a guess.[8]
Cobbe sought advice from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Over a three-year period, a research project headed by Stanley Wells and Alastair Laing, performed a number of authentication studies on the portrait. Wells and Laing concluded that sufficient circumstantial evidence exists to announce the project's findings. They also suggested that the "Janssen portrait" was a copy of the Cobbe portrait. As is detailed in the catalogue of the 2009 exhibition "Shakespeare Found", several other early copies of the Cobbe portrait have been located and no less than three of them have independent traditions as portraits of Shakespeare.[3]
In 2006, the National Portrait Gallery concluded that the so-called Chandos portrait was then the only existing portrait painted during the life of Shakespeare.[9] If verified, the Cobbe portrait would become the second portrait of William Shakespeare possibly painted from life.
Proposal of Stanley Wells and collaborators
After extensive infra-red and x-ray test analysis including growth-ring testing of the panel on which the portrait is painted, scientists have estimated that the panel is from around 1610.[10] According to Stanley Wells[3] the portrait has been in the possession of the Cobbe family since the early 18th century and is most likely a portrait of Shakespeare. It, or more likely a copy such as the Janssen, is possibly the source of Martin Droeshout's familiar engraving on the title page of the Shakespeare First Folio (1623). The portrait is thought to have been commissioned by Shakespeare's patron, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton.[11][12] Wells said:
The evidence that it represents Shakespeare and that it was done from life, though it is circumstantial, is in my view overwhelming. I feel in little doubt that this is a portrait of Shakespeare, done from life and commissioned by the Earl of Southampton.
In deciding between the Cobbe original and one of its copies as a source for the engraving, Wells draws attention to a greater similarity in the shape of the figure between the engraving and the Janssen copy.[3] Although many details of the doublet and collar are eliminated in the engraving, the angle and length of the arms, the shape of the fabric at the shoulders, and the length of the torso, all show a greater resemblance in the Janssen.[6] The alteration to the hairline of the Janssen must date before 1770, when an engraving was made of the painting in its altered state, but its timing relative to the production of the Droeshout engraving is unknown. The fact that this alteration was made, in part, to reverse an earlier alteration to the hairline in the Cobbe suggests to Wells that it was made independently, and that the Janssen copy may have been used as a source for the engraving in this aged state.
Controversy
In a review of the exhibition catalogue edited by Wells, Robert Bearman writes: "It is strongly argued that there is a striking resemblance between the newly discovered portrait (or, rather, a copy) and the Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare, and that the painting might itself have been used by Droeshout." Bearman also expresses scepticism about the link with Shakespeare's patron Wriothesley.[13]
Other experts are even more sceptical, and suggest that even the circumstantial evidence is weak. Shakespeare scholar David Scott Kastan also took the view that there were reasons to question the Cobbe portrait's provenance – whether it was in fact once owned by the Earl of Southampton or commissioned by him, as the Trust representatives believe – and to doubt whether the richly dressed man in the portrait was Shakespeare. "If I had to bet, I would say it's not Shakespeare", Kastan said. But even if it were, he said, the traditions of Elizabethan portraiture meant that it would be unwise to conclude that Shakespeare actually looked like the figure depicted in the portrait. "It might be a portrait of Shakespeare, but not a likeness, because the convention of portraiture at the time was often to idealise the subject", he said.[14]
Sir Roy Strong, former director of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, and a leading scholar of Elizabethan and Jacobean portraiture, has called Wells's claims "codswallop".[15] Dr Tarnya Cooper, curator of 16th century portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, also voiced scepticism. While acknowledging that the Janssen portrait and the Cobbe portrait are versions of the same image, she believes it likely that both portraits represent Sir Thomas Overbury. Of Wells's identification of the sitter as Shakespeare, she said, "I respect Wells's scholarship enormously, but portraiture is a very different area, and this doesn't add up."[16]
This portrait of Sir Thomas Overbury, bequeathed to the Bodleian Library in 1740, has been suggested as the source of the smaller Cobbe or Janssen portraits.
An authentic portrait of Sir Thomas Overbury (1581–1613) was bequeathed to the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1740. This picture bears a startling resemblance to the "Cobbe" painting (and its companions). Features such as a distinctive bushy hairline, and a slightly malformed left ear that may once have borne the weight of a jewelled earring, appear identical. Even the man's beautifully intricate lace collar, though not identical in pattern, shares overall design with "Cobbe", having square rather than rounded corners.[17]
Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel wrote that the Cobbe portrait was not an authentic likeness of Shakespeare. She noted the opinion of Eberhard J. Nikitsch, a specialist in inscriptions, who said that the script of the painting's inscription was not commonly used in early 17th-century portraits, and that it must have been added later.[18]
Wells and his colleagues have responded to the criticisms, arguing that David Piper's original 1964 identification of the Janssen as Overbury was based on the misreading of an inventory. They also assert that the hairline was altered before 1630, because another copy of that date already showed the balding forehead. They counter Duncan-Jones's argument that the costume is too aristocratic for Shakespeare by comparing it to that worn by Shakespeare's colleague and collaborator John Fletcher in a portrait of the period.[19]
Latin text
The portrait includes the Latin legend Principum amicitias! ("The Friendships of Princes!") painted above the sitter's head. This is speculated[20] to be a quotation from Horace's Odes, book 2, ode 1 (below), where the words are addressed to Asinius Pollio, who, among other things, was a poet and playwright. In Horace's context they form part of a sentence meaning "beware the alliances of princes."[20] The word for "beware" (or danger[ous]) is not, however present in the inscription, so it literally translates as "friendships of Princes". The fact that the word "friendships" appears in the accusative case in the inscription (rather than in the nominative, as one would expect if it were to stand alone), underscores the fact that the inscription was meant to allude to the passage in Horace 2.1.
bellique causas et uitia et modos ludumque Fortunae grauisque principum amicitias et arma nondum expiatis uncta cruoribus, periculosae plenum opus aleae, tractas et incedis per ignis suppositos cineri doloso.
You are writing on the civil disturbances during the consulship of Metellus, the causes of war, and the mistakes, and the methods, and the play of Fortune, and the destructive friendships of rulers, and weapons stained with blood still unatoned for. It is a work filled with dangerous chance, and you are walking over fires that smoulder with deceitful ashes.
The Cobbe portrait of Southampton
Cobbe portrait of Southampton
The claims regarding this portrait follow from research into another portrait in the Cobbe collection, also displayed at Hatchlands Park, which came to public attention in 2002 when the painting, which for three centuries had been identified as a portrait of a woman, "Lady Norton", was confidently identified as a portrait of a young man. The coincidence of distinctive features, the extraordinarily long hair, the high forehead, the long nose terminating in a bulb and the slender upper lip with known portraits of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, led to the conviction that it depicted Shakespeare's patron the 3rd Earl of Southampton himself, whose great-granddaughter was Lady Elizabeth Norton.[22] The portrait is the earliest extant oil portrait of the androgynous-looking youthful Earl to survive and shows him at the time that Shakespeare dedicated his long poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) to him. The Earl has often been suggested as the "Fair Youth" who is the love object in some of Shakespeare's sonnets. Alastair Laing of the National Trust wrote at the time that, "I am very happy indeed about the identification. Given the connection to Shakespeare and his sonnets, it is a very, very exciting discovery."[22]
Hans Eworth was a Flemish painter active in England in the mid-16th century. Along with other exiled Flemings, he made a career in Tudor London, painting allegorical images as well as portraits of the gentry and nobility. About 40 paintings are now attributed to Eworth, among them portraits of Mary I and Elizabeth I. Eworth also executed decorative commissions for Elizabeth's Office of the Revels in the early 1570s.
Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, was the only son of Henry Wriothesley, 2nd Earl of Southampton, and Mary Browne, daughter of Anthony Browne, 1st Viscount Montagu. Shakespeare's two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, were dedicated to Southampton, who is frequently identified as the Fair Youth of Shakespeare's Sonnets.
The Chandos portrait is the most famous of the portraits that are believed to depict William Shakespeare (1564–1616). Painted between 1600 and 1610, it may have served as the basis for the engraved portrait of Shakespeare used in the First Folio in 1623. It is named after the 3rd Duke of Chandos, who formerly owned the painting. The portrait was given to the National Portrait Gallery, London, on its foundation in 1856, and it is listed as the first work in its collection.
George Richmond was an English painter and portraitist. In his youth he was a member of The Ancients, a group of followers of William Blake. Later in life he established a career as a portrait painter, which included painting the portraits of the British gentry, nobility and royalty.
Cowdray House consists of the ruins of one of England's great Tudor houses, architecturally comparable to many of the great palaces and country houses of that time. It is situated in the parish of Easebourne, just east of Midhurst, West Sussex standing on the north bank of the River Rother. It was largely destroyed by fire on 24 September 1793, but the ruins are Grade I listed for their historical importance.
Martin Droeshout was an English engraver of Flemish descent, who is best known as illustrator of the title portrait for William Shakespeare's collected works, the First Folio of 1623, edited by John Heminges and Henry Condell, fellow actors of the Bard. Nevertheless, Droeshout produced other more ambitious designs in his career.
Cornelius Johnson or Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen was an English painter of portraits of Dutch or Flemish parentage. He was active in England, from at least 1618 to 1643, when he moved to Middelburg in the Netherlands to escape the English Civil War. Between 1646 and 1652 he lived in Amsterdam, before settling in Utrecht, where he died.
The Flower portrait is the name of one of the painted portraits of William Shakespeare. A 2005 investigation of the portrait led to the conclusion that it was a forged artwork painted in the 19th century.
William Larkin was an English painter active from 1609 until his death in 1619, known for his iconic portraits of members of the court of James I of England which capture in brilliant detail the opulent layering of textiles, embroidery, lace, and jewellery characteristic of fashion in the Jacobean era, as well as representing numerous fine examples of oriental carpets in Renaissance painting.
No contemporary physical description of William Shakespeare is known to exist. The two portraits of him that are the most famous are the engraving that appears on the title-page of the First Folio, published in 1623, and the other is the sculpture that adorns his memorial in Stratford upon Avon, which dates from before 1623. Experts and critics have argued that several other paintings from the period may represent him, and more than 60 portraits purporting to be of Shakespeare were offered for sale to the National Portrait Gallery within four decades of its foundation in 1856, but in none of them has Shakespeare's identity been proven.
Gerard Johnson Jr. was a sculptor working in Jacobean England who is traditionally supposed to have created Shakespeare's funerary monument. In May 1612 Johnson was paid for making part of a fountain for the east garden at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire.
Elizabeth Wriothesley, Countess of Southampton was one of the chief ladies-in-waiting to Elizabeth I of England in the later years of her reign.
Charles Wisner Barrell was an American writer. He first became significant as an art critic, promoting realism. He later built a career as an early exponent of public relations and as a documentary film maker.
The Ashbourne portrait is one of several portraits that have been falsely identified as portrayals of William Shakespeare. At least 60 such works had been offered for sale to the National Portrait Gallery in the 19th century within the first forty years of its existence; the Ashbourne portrait was one of these. The portrait is now a part of the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.
Newbridge Demesne is an early 18th-century Georgian estate and mansion situated in north County Dublin, Ireland. It was built in 1736 by Charles Cobbe, Archbishop of Dublin, and remained the property of his Cobbe descendants until 1985. It was then acquired by Dublin County Council, in a unique arrangement, under which Newbridge House would remain the family home.
John Swaine, was an English draughtsman and engraver.
The Droeshout portrait or Droeshout engraving is a portrait of William Shakespeare engraved by Martin Droeshout as the frontispiece for the title page of the First Folio collection of Shakespeare's plays, published in 1623. It is one of only two works of art definitively identifiable as a depiction of the poet; the other is the statue erected as his funeral monument in Shakespeare's home town of Stratford-upon-Avon. Both are posthumous.
The Lenthall pictures were a number of paintings owned by the Lenthall family and housed at Burford Priory. The collection was publicly commented on by art historians and tourists. It was largely dispersed in two sales in 1808 and 1833, although some works were retained by the family and sold in the late 20th century.
The Sanders portrait is reputed to be one of the few images of William Shakespeare done in his lifetime. It features a middle-aged man wearing a black doublet with silver ornamentation. It also has a label affixed to the back which reads:
Shakspere [sic] Born April 23=1564 Died April 23-1616 Aged 52 This Likeness taken 1603 Age at that time 39 ys
Portrait of Jacopo Sannazaro, also known as Portrait of a Man, is an oil painting by the Venetian master Titian, dated to about 1513. It is part of the Royal Collection, and hangs in Buckingham Palace.
1 2 3 4 5 6 Stanley Wells, editor. "A Life Portrait at Last: Portraits, Poet, Patron, Poems", The Cobbe Foundation and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 2009.
↑ David Piper, O Sweet Mr. Shakespeare I'll Have His Picture: The Changing Image of Shakespeare's Person, 1600–1800, National Portrait Gallery, 1964, p.36
↑ Tarnya Cooper (ed), Searching for Shakespeare, National Portrait Gallery and Yale Center for British Art, Yale University Press, 2006, p. 68; The Guardian, "Searching for Shakespeare"
↑ Duncan-Jones, Katherine. "Shakespeare Unfound(ed)? The real identity of the sitter for the new 'Shakespeare' portrait", The Times Literary Supplement, 18 March 2009.
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