The engraving is signed "Martin Droeshout. sculpsit. London" and is provisionally attributed by the National Portrait Gallery to Martin Droeshout the Younger, born in 1601, the son of Michael Droeshout, an immigrant from Brussels. A competing attribution to his uncle, Martin Droeshout the Elder, was largely set aside after archival research by June Schlueter found the Elder was in London at the time the engraver of the portrait was known to be working in Madrid.
When was the Droeshout portrait of Shakespeare published?
The Droeshout portrait was published in 1623 as the frontispiece for the First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. It appeared seven years after Shakespeare died, and the engraver almost certainly worked from an earlier image rather than from life.
How many official portraits of Shakespeare are there?
Only two works of art are definitively identified as depicting William Shakespeare: the Droeshout engraving and the statue erected as his funeral monument in Stratford-upon-Avon. Both are posthumous.
What did Ben Jonson say about the Droeshout portrait?
Ben Jonson, a friend of Shakespeare, praised the Droeshout portrait in his poem To the Reader, printed alongside it in the First Folio. He wrote that the engraver had striven with nature to outdo the life and had hit Shakespeare's face accurately, though he noted the engraver could not capture Shakespeare's wit, for which the reader would need to turn to the plays.
Is the Flower portrait the original source for the Droeshout engraving?
No. The Flower portrait was once widely accepted as the source Droeshout copied, but in 1905 art scholar Marion Spielmann showed it corresponded to the second state of the engraving rather than the first, indicating it was a copy from the print, not the reverse. Chemical analysis in 2005 confirmed the Flower portrait is a 19th-century fake painted over an authentic 17th-century panel.
How many states does the Droeshout engraving have?
The Droeshout portrait exists in two states printed from the same plate. The first state survives in only four known copies and was probably a test printing. The second state, with heavier shadows and differences in the jawline and moustache, appears in the overwhelming majority of surviving First Folio copies. The original plate was still in use for the Fourth Folio of 1685.