Flower portrait
Encyclopedia
The name originates with its previous owners, the Flower family, who gave it to the Royal Shakespeare Company
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Royal Shakespeare Company is a major British theatre company, based in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. The company employs 700 staff and produces around 20 productions a year from its home in Stratford-upon-Avon and plays regularly in London, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and on tour across...
. The painting depicts Shakespeare gazing out of the picture and wearing a wide white collar. The painting has a signed date of 1609, but many art experts had been suspicious of its provenance before it was x-rayed in 2005.
The picture has been commonly used, for example, in the covers of Shakespeare's published plays. It is similar to the Droeshout engraving, which appeared 1623 in the first folio publication of Shakespeare's plays and is effectively its copy.
History
According to statements by Edgar Flower, whose family had owned the painting, it was acquired sometime around 1840 by a Mr H.C. Clements, whose widow sold it to a member of the Flower family. Mrs C. Flower donated it to the Shakespeare Memorial trust in Stratford, and it was exhibited at its picture gallery there in 1892. A number of experts who studied it at the time accepted that it was an authentic 17th century painting. It was exhibited as the original from which the Droeshout engraving had been copied. Sidney LeeSidney Lee
Sir Sidney Lee was an English biographer and critic.He was born Solomon Lazarus Lee at 12 Keppel Street, Bloomsbury, London and educated at the City of London School and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated in modern history in 1882. In the next year he became assistant-editor of the...
, in his 1898 biography of Shakespeare, declared that "no other pictorial representation of the poet has equally serious claims to be treated as contemporary with himself." However, in 1904 the art critic Marion Spielmann
Marion Spielmann
Marion Harry Alexander Spielmann was a prolific Victorian art critic and scholar who was the editor of The Connoisseur and Magazine of Art...
undertook a detailed analysis in which he demonstrated that the painting resembled Droeshout's revised second-state print rather than the original print, concluding that if Droeshout had copied the painting, then the first version would be more directly imitative. He took the view that the painting was an early copy of the print.
Many historians accepted this argument, but the painting still had its defenders. In 1966 an x-ray revealed that the portrait was painted on top of a 16th-century painting that depicts a Madonna and child with John the Baptist
John the Baptist
John the Baptist was an itinerant preacher and a major religious figure mentioned in the Canonical gospels. He is described in the Gospel of Luke as a relative of Jesus, who led a movement of baptism at the Jordan River...
. In 2000 Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel
Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel
Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel is a German Professor of English, literary critic, Shakespeare scholar and writer. For the first time, she applied truly trans-disciplinary research methods to study Shakespeare’s time, life, work, portraits, religion and the ‘Dark Lady’ of his sonnets on the basis...
reasserted claims to the painting's authenticity, publishing a detailed argument in 2006.
2004 study
In 2004 experts of the National Portrait Gallery of the UK investigated three portraits of Shakespeare in preparation for the gallery's 150th anniversary exhibition, due to open in 2006 to commemorate the foundation of the NPG with the acquisition of the Chandos portraitChandos portrait
The "Chandos" portrait is one of the most famous of the portraits that may depict William Shakespeare . Believed to have been painted from life 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 James...
in 1856. On April 21, 2005 investigators announced that the painting was not contemporary to Shakespeare.
Most of the pigments on the painting are those that were available in the 17th century but the golden braid of the doublet was painted with chrome yellow
Chrome yellow
Chrome Yellow is a natural yellow pigment made of lead chromate . It was first extracted from the mineral crocoite by the French chemist Louis Vauquelin in 1809...
, a pigment which was not available before around 1814. The particles of the chrome yellow are part of the normal layer of paint, meaning that it was not painted afterwards. Therefore Tarnya Cooper, one of the curator
Curator
A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...
s of the Gallery, announced that the painting is a 19th century forgery, dating around 1818–1840.