"I pity the fool that calls this hair style a man bun"
Posted on 11/22/2022 3:10:51 PM PST by nickcarraway
Unveiling of an early 17th-century painting has caused a stir—but what does the evidence say?
The unveiling and proposed £10m sale of an early 17th century portrait, reputedly of William Shakespeare, has caused a stir. The attribution is being debated, but what does the evidence show?
The inner frame of the 20 x 18 inch portrait includes the title Shakespeare, but this is an 18th- or19th-century addition, when the painting was relined.
The figure portrayed is a bearded, balding man in shirt and doublet, with the top left and right of the canvas helpfully inscribed 1608 and AE (aged) 44 – the correct age for the playwright at the time.
A Courtauld Institute examination of the picture in 2016 concluded the pigments were consistent with the period, while its well-preserved state pointed to it having remained in the same location for a lengthy period, possibly centuries.
Cleaning removed a heavy black beard to reveal an original, lighter trimmed and pointed beard.
Removing the frame for closer examination uncovered the stylised letters RP to the top right of the painting—the cypher of Robert Peake the Elder (c.1551-1619), who by 1576 was recorded as being in the pay of the Office of the Revels, which oversaw the performance of plays for Queen Elizabeth I.
Several records show payments to Peake for commissions, including for a portrait of Henry, Prince of Wales in 1603. Peake became Serjeant-Painter to King James I around 1607.
Peake’s son William (c.1580-1639) owned a successful print shop and knew the engraver Martin Droeshout, who created the image of Shakespeare for the 1623 First Folio of the Collected Works. The National Portrait Gallery holds Droeshout engravings published by the Peake family press.
Lionel Cust, in his book Shakespeare’s England, notes William Peake’s eminence alongside Messrs Sudbury and Humble as the printers of choice for celebrity portraits of the day.
Further connections come from the Office of the Revels. Both Shakespeare and Robert Peake lived nearby and worked there before and after it moved from Clerkenwell to Blackfriars in 1608. Peake painted scenery and other items for the theatre, the only indoor establishment of the King’s Men or the Shakespeare Company, where Shakespeare rehearsed and staged many of his plays.
With Shakespeare at the height of his powers in 1608, a portrait from that time would make sense. Who better to commission than the Serjeant-Painter to the King, whom he must have known through the theatre? Accounts show that Queen Anne, a supporter of the King’s Men, was also a patron of Peake at the time.
Comparisons between the picture and the only other two confirmed portraits of Shakespeare are trickier. The bust on his Stratford-upon-Avon tomb has been much changed and restored over the years and is not thought a good likeness. That leaves the Droeshout engraving for the First Folio. Researchers compared the left eye, with its drooping lid and slight deformity possibly caused by cancer. Both portraits have the thick eyelid, but as hard evidence, this seems a stretch.
The Danby family, who had direct connections with Shakespeare, are known to have had the painting on display at Swinton Hall from 1860-65, and probably for a great deal longer.
In summary, the evidence is circumstantial but fairly compelling: the portrait is of the right period and carries a contemporary inscription giving the correct age for Shakespeare; Peake—arguably the pre-eminent official court artist of the time—has been identified as an associate of the playwright; and the artist’s son printed works by the creator of the First Folio’s portrait engraving.
Duncan Phillips, who uncovered the connections between Peake, Droeshout and the portrait’s history, says: “There is more evidence for this portrait of Shakespeare than any other known painting of the playwright.”
The canvas is being sold by its anonymous owner by private treaty without an auction and is currently on show at Grosvenor House hotel in west London.
Seems like a lot of them are Australians.
That was the way they wrote the letter “s” at that time. That carried through to our Colonial and early nationhood days. The Declaration of Indepedence among other documents contain that same penmanship.
There’s a whole lot about Shakespeare that isn’t actually known for certain. The very few signatures attributed to his own handwriting spell his own name differently, so we don’t really know for sure how to spell Shakespeare. His portraits may not have been of him or made by people who ever met him in life, so we don’t really know what he looked like. There’s a lot of persistent controversy about the authorship and attribution of his plays, so we don’t know for sure that he wrote what he is credited with writing, yet.. there he is, a super prominent figure in history with numerous contributions to western culture and language.
"I pity the fool that calls this hair style a man bun"
Oooops! My bad! The D of I doesn’t have the f/s mixup, but some colonial documents do.
That being said, here is a portrait of the man who wrote the plays:
I was guessing the 44th year of Queen Elizabth’s reign, but that would have been 1602 or 03; so off by half a decade from 1608. So that can’t be it.
I’m with you. I know straight married men who have those.
Don't believe it. Don't believe it at all. DeVere's known writing is nothing like Shakespeare's. Shakespeare had a facility with meter unmatched by an other poetry. That's why poets like Worsdworth can tell which lines were written by Shakespeare, and which were filled in by others.
It looks like he wore sunglasses.
Yes, look at our founding documents and you will see the long F as an S.
Yes, it’s called a “long S”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
1608 was past the time of Middle English, though, and during the period of Early Modern English.
The earliest Caslon typeface has cool long S’s — and it comes with Adobe Caslon Pro, which is fun. (Sorry, I’m a font geek, and Caslon is one of my favorite fonts. You guys might like it better after learning Caslon was also a gunsmith!)
I believe it was common to paint the whole scene first then do the faces and hands. These weren’t polaroids. It took many days to paint the background then they would sit for the actual portrait. Or so my know it all mother told me. She knows everything, just ask her.
Believe it. Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the works attributed to William Shakespeare. They don’t even know if the glove maker’s son could read and write.
Beautiful green/gray eyes.
Wonder what his pronouns were?
Pish.
Do you know what the AE mean/ stand for?
‘Middle English often replaced “S” with “F”.’
what is called Middle English by Shakespeare’s time had developed into what we know today as Modern English through morphological changes such as the Great Vowel Shift and other linguistic issues...early ModE often used the marker resembling a small ‘f’ within words containing ‘s’...this can be seen in some colonial printings...
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