A portrait of William Shakespeare? 'Codswallop' says expert
One of the country's most eminent art historians has branded as "codswallop" claims that a portrait, which will go on display in Stratford-upon-Avon this week, is of Shakespeare.
Comments by Sir Roy Strong, a former director of the Victoria and Albert museum and the National Portrait Gallery, have stoked the furious row among Shakespeare scholars, who disagree about the true identity of the man in the controversial "Cobbe portrait".
Organisers of the Shakespeare Found exhibition, who will unveil the portrait to the public on Wednesday to mark the playwright's birthday, continue to insist that the painting is of England's greatest literary hero. But Strong disagrees and has ridiculed distinguished academic Professor Stanley Wells, saying he is wrong to support the controversial identification.
"It is codswallop, isn't it?" said Strong. "I don't know why Stanley Wells has gone off on this fantasy journey."
Strong has written the preface for the catalogue of a second exhibition, also about the image of the bard.
The Face and Figure of Shakespeare, which opened this weekend in London, concentrates instead on the way that 18th-century sculptors reinvented Shakespeare. It also celebrates the 250th anniversary of the first full-length statue of Shakespeare, by Louis-François Roubiliac, originally installed in a temple to Shakespeare on the banks of the Thames by actor David Garrick.
The curators of The Face and Figure of Shakespeare, Marcus Risdell and Iain Mackintosh, have put together for the first time a selection of 50 of the best-known paintings and statues believed to represent Shakespeare. Their research reveals how well-known earlier images, such as the National Portrait Gallery's so-called Chandos Shakespeare and the copper engraving featured on the title page of the first collected edition of the plays (described later as a "pudding-faced effigy"), have each been copied, modified and idealised to create a romantic, heroic image of the bard that better suited the times.
The new show's two curators agree with Strong that the stylish portrait about to go on public exhibition in Stratford is really of Sir Thomas Overbury (1581-1613), a courtier and poet who was sent to the Tower of London by James I and died of poisoning five months later. A previously established painting of Overbury, thought to be by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger and held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, does much to prove their point, they argue, because it so closely resembles the contentious painting. In their exhibition catalogue Mackintosh and Risdell write that it "seems strange to us" that the Overbury portraits should "have disappeared for most of the 18th century, only to emerge as Shakespeare in 1770".
Undaunted by growing academic scepticism, Wells, who is chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and edited the Oxford Shakespeare series for 30 years, said this weekend that he was standing by his conviction that the painting was a lifetime portrait of the playwright...
Read entire article at Observer (UK)
Comments by Sir Roy Strong, a former director of the Victoria and Albert museum and the National Portrait Gallery, have stoked the furious row among Shakespeare scholars, who disagree about the true identity of the man in the controversial "Cobbe portrait".
Organisers of the Shakespeare Found exhibition, who will unveil the portrait to the public on Wednesday to mark the playwright's birthday, continue to insist that the painting is of England's greatest literary hero. But Strong disagrees and has ridiculed distinguished academic Professor Stanley Wells, saying he is wrong to support the controversial identification.
"It is codswallop, isn't it?" said Strong. "I don't know why Stanley Wells has gone off on this fantasy journey."
Strong has written the preface for the catalogue of a second exhibition, also about the image of the bard.
The Face and Figure of Shakespeare, which opened this weekend in London, concentrates instead on the way that 18th-century sculptors reinvented Shakespeare. It also celebrates the 250th anniversary of the first full-length statue of Shakespeare, by Louis-François Roubiliac, originally installed in a temple to Shakespeare on the banks of the Thames by actor David Garrick.
The curators of The Face and Figure of Shakespeare, Marcus Risdell and Iain Mackintosh, have put together for the first time a selection of 50 of the best-known paintings and statues believed to represent Shakespeare. Their research reveals how well-known earlier images, such as the National Portrait Gallery's so-called Chandos Shakespeare and the copper engraving featured on the title page of the first collected edition of the plays (described later as a "pudding-faced effigy"), have each been copied, modified and idealised to create a romantic, heroic image of the bard that better suited the times.
The new show's two curators agree with Strong that the stylish portrait about to go on public exhibition in Stratford is really of Sir Thomas Overbury (1581-1613), a courtier and poet who was sent to the Tower of London by James I and died of poisoning five months later. A previously established painting of Overbury, thought to be by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger and held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, does much to prove their point, they argue, because it so closely resembles the contentious painting. In their exhibition catalogue Mackintosh and Risdell write that it "seems strange to us" that the Overbury portraits should "have disappeared for most of the 18th century, only to emerge as Shakespeare in 1770".
Undaunted by growing academic scepticism, Wells, who is chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and edited the Oxford Shakespeare series for 30 years, said this weekend that he was standing by his conviction that the painting was a lifetime portrait of the playwright...