THE CHANDOS PORTRAIT OF SHAKSPEARE.
This far-famed picture, believed to be the only genuine portrait of the poet, was bought at the sale at Stowe, in the autumn of 1848, by the Earl of Ellesmere, for 355 guineas. Its history, as stated in the Athenæum shortly after the period of the sale, is as follows:—“The Duke of Chandos obtained it by marriage with the daughter and heiress of a Mr. Nicholl, of Minchenden House, Southgate; Mr. Nicholl obtained it from a Mr. Robert Keck, of the Inner Temple, who gave (the first and best) Mrs. Barry, the actress, as Oldys tells us, forty guineas for it. Mrs. Barry had it from Betterton, and Betterton had it from Sir William Davenant, who was a professed admirer of Shakspeare, and not unwilling to be thought his son. Davenant was born in 1605, and died in 1668; and Betterton, (as every reader of Pepys will recollect,) was the great actor, belonging to the Duke’s Theatre, of which Davenant was the patentee. The elder brother of Davenant, (Parson Robert,) had been heard to relate, as Aubrey informs us, that Shakspeare had often kissed Sir William when a boy.
“Davenant lived quite near enough to Shakspeare’s time to have obtained a genuine portrait of the poet whom he admired—in an age, too, when the Shakspeare mania was not so strong as it is now. There is no doubt that this was the portrait which Davenant believed to be like Shakspeare, and which Kneller, before 1692, copied and presented to glorious John Dryden, who repaid the painter with one of the best of his admirable epistles.
“The Chandos Shakspeare is a small portrait on canvas, 22 inches long by 18 broad. The face is thoughtful, the eyes are expressive, and the hair is of a brown black. The dress is black, with a white turnover collar, the strings of which are loose. There is a small gold ring in the left ear. We have had an opportunity of inspecting it both before and after the sale, and in the very best light, and have no hesitation in saying that the copies we have seen of it are very far from like. It agrees in many respects—the short nose especially—with the Stratford bust, and is not more unlike the engraving before the first folio—or the Gerard Johnson bust on the Stratford monument—than Raeburn’s Sir Walter Scott is unlike Sir Thomas Lawrence’s—or West’s Lord Byron unlike the better known portrait by Phillips. It has evidently been touched upon; the yellow oval that surrounds it has a look of Kneller’s age.”
The opinion of the writer in the Athenæum is, that the Chandos picture is not the original for which Shakspeare sat, but a copy made for Sir William Davenant from some known and acknowledged portrait of the poet.