Chandos portrait

• 1. Introduction

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  The Chandos portrait is an oil painting thought to show William Shakespeare, who lived from 1564-1616. It dates from somewhere between 1600 and 1610. The National Portrait Gallery in London now owns it, yet the gallery will go no further than saying it is "certainly fairly likely" that the sitter is the writer. That careful phrase hides two open questions. Who actually painted the picture? And is the man in it truly Shakespeare? Neither answer can be proven. This documentary follows a handwritten note, a line of owners and a series of copies. It also asks why one damaged canvas has carried so much weight, and what people have imagined when they looked at its face.

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• 2. Who Held the Brush

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  In 1719, George Vertue wrote the first known reference to the painting, and he credited it to a man named John Taylor. Vertue described Taylor as a respected member of the Painter-Stainers' Company. He also called him an actor and painter, and Shakespeare's "intimate friend". A John Taylor may have acted with the Children of Paul's, which would fit that description.

  Katherine Duncan-Jones reads the note differently. She argues that "John Taylor" could be a misreading of "Jo: Taylor". That would point to the actor Joseph Taylor, a protégé of the older Shakespeare.

  Vertue himself seems to have hesitated. In a margin of a book that same year, he wrote the name "Richard Burbridge" and then crossed it out. It is thought he briefly and mistakenly gave the picture to Shakespeare's friend Richard Burbage, who lived from 1567-1619. He then wrote that the painting was by "one Taylor". Vertue's notes also name the men who owned the portrait before the Duke of Chandos, and the first of them had a remarkable claim of his own.

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• 3. A Line of Owners

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  William Davenant, who lived from 1606-1668, is the earliest owner Vertue names. Vertue says the portrait was left to Davenant in Taylor's will. Davenant was possibly Shakespeare's godson. According to the gossip chronicler John Aubrey, Davenant even claimed to be the playwright's illegitimate son.

  Thomas Betterton then bought the painting from Davenant. He sold it on to the lawyer Robert Keck, a collector of Shakespeare memorabilia. After Keck died in 1719, it passed to his daughter. It was then inherited by John Nichol, who had married into the Keck family.

  Nichol's daughter Margaret married James Brydges, 3rd Duke of Chandos, and that marriage gave the picture its name. It stayed in the Chandos title until Richard Temple-Grenville, 2nd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, sold it to the Earl of Ellesmere in 1848. Ellesmere gave it away in 1856, the year the National Portrait Gallery was founded. It became the first portrait the new institution acquired.

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• 4. The Droeshout Test

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  Martin Droeshout's engraving in the First Folio of 1623 is the one image that can be definitely identified as Shakespeare. It was probably commissioned by his friends and family. Scholars consider it a reasonably accurate likeness because those close associates accepted it, and because Ben Jonson praised it when the book appeared.

  The man in the Chandos portrait resembles the man in that engraving. This gives the oil painting an indirect legitimacy. The Chandos portrait may even have served as the basis for the Droeshout engraving.

  The canvas also inspired two later portraits of Shakespeare. One is by Gerard Soest. The other, grander picture is called the Chesterfield portrait, after a former owner. Both were probably painted in the 1660s or 1670s, within living memory of Shakespeare. The Chesterfield portrait is now held by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon. A far more modern kind of evidence arrived in 2006, from a long study carried out inside the National Portrait Gallery itself.

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• 5. Cooper's Verdict

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  In 2006, the art historian Tarnya Cooper of the National Portrait Gallery completed a study that had run for three and a half years. It examined portraits purported to be of Shakespeare. She concluded that the Chandos portrait was most likely a representation of him.

  Cooper pointed to the sitter's earring and loose shirt-ties. These details were emblematic of poets. The poet John Donne wore similar fashions, as did Shakespeare's patron the Earl of Pembroke. She still readily acknowledged that the painting's authenticity cannot be proven.

  Cooper also reported that the canvas has been badly damaged by over-cleaning and retouching. Some areas are abraded, while others have been slightly altered. The hair has been extended, and the beard is longer and more pointed than when it was first painted. Even in this changed state, the picture was soon being reproduced for a wide audience.

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• 6. Copies and Engravings

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  An unknown artist made a copy of the portrait at least as early as 1689. Many images of Shakespeare from the 18th century used that copy as a model, so the face spread well beyond the original canvas.

  In 1709, Gerard Vandergucht engraved the painting for Nicholas Rowe's edition of Shakespeare's works. Almost forty years later, in 1747, Jacobus Houbraken made another print. The Chesterfield portrait counts as a further copy in the same family. Houbraken's print carried the sitter's features to still more readers, and some of them soon began reading those features in strange ways.

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• 7. Reading the Face

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  No written description of Shakespeare's appearance from his own time is known to exist. Over the centuries, scholars therefore leaned on the Chandos portrait and drew conflicting conclusions about his ethnicity, some of them based on phrenology.

  George Steevens said the picture gave Shakespeare "the complexion of a Jew, or rather that of a chimney sweeper in the jaundice". Some Victorians recoiled at the idea that the portrait showed Shakespeare at all. According to Ben Macintyre, the critic J. Hain Friswell insisted that "one cannot readily imagine our essentially English Shakespeare to have been a dark, heavy man, with a foreign expression". Friswell agreed with Steevens that the face looked decidedly Jewish. These remarks reveal the prejudices of the viewers far more than they reveal the sitter.

  The most surprising reader was Sigmund Freud. According to Ernest Jones, the portrait convinced Freud that Shakespeare was French. Freud insisted the face could not be Anglo-Saxon, and he suggested the name was a corruption of Jacques Pierre.

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