William Shakepeare Biography section 2

Section II:

Shakespeare and the Sanders Portrait

The short answer is that we don't know. There are a number of portraits, but which one (if any) depicts the "real" Shakespeare? We know roughly what he might have worn given his time and his class, and the clothing shown in the portraits seems authentic, but which face belongs to this enigmatic figure?

One candidate has a distinctly Canadian connection.

The Sanders Portrait: An

actual likeness of William Shakespeare?

TheDiscovery

An exciting discovery came to light in 2001 in Ottawa. Incredibly, a previously unknown portrait of William Shakespeare, painted by one John Sanders, had been found: it had been kept for generations in a cupboard in the upstairs hall of the Sullivans, a Canadian family descended from the same John Sanders. The portrait was painted in oil on wood, and a label on the back read:

“Shakspere, born April 23rd 1564, died April 23rd 1616, aged 52, this likeness taken 1603, age at that time 39 years.”

The Questions

Initial scientific tests indicated that the frame, paint and stye are consistent with 17^th-century painting. Later tests showed that the ink and the material of the label are genuine. The portrait has not been re-touched, nor was it painted on top of an older picture. Although the scientific results prove that the portrait is genuine, they cannot confirm that the image is in fact the Bard, as even if the label is genuine it could only have been written some time after his death.

The Trail

In May 2001, acting on a tip from her mother, Globe and Mail journalist Stephanie Nolen met with Loyd Sullivan in Ottawa to discuss the painting that may be a portrait of Shakespeare. (Sullivan inherited the painting from his mother in 1972.) She wrote,

"Lloyd Sullivan believed he knew this much from family tradition: the portrait was painted a dozen generations ago by his ancestor,

John Sanders, born in 1576, the eldest son of a family in Worcester, England. Young John left home to make his fortune in London. There he became an actor, or at least a bit player, in Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, which was formed in 1594, when Shakespeare was thirty. John Sanders also dabbled in oils and did odd bits of painting around the theatre. He liked to try his hand at portraiture.

And sometime in 1603, he prepared a sturdy oak panel and some bright oil paint and recorded the face of his colleague, William Shakespeare. At some point Sanders or one of his children labeled the picture 'Shakespere' (in a spelling the poet himself used), and included the playwright's birth and death dates, noting that this was his likeness at the age of thirty-nine. The portrait was handed down, passing from the first John Sanders to his son, and so on through the family." (Nolen, 10)

Stephanie Nolen later wrote Shakespeare's Face, a book about the testing of the portrait. . Five of the seven authorities she consulted in the course of

her research do not believe that the picture is of Shakespeare.

"However, the results of the tests that were done were conclusive: the painting was executed on wood that dated from the correct period; the materials and the way in which they were used were consistent with a painting done in England in 1603; no anachronistic material was found; and the label identifying the subject of the portrait was made of rag paper dating from 1640 at the latest. All these elements indicate that the painting is indeed an old painting and not a relatively modern copy or fake."

Marie-Claude Corbeil, Senior Conservation Scientist, Analytical Research Laboratory, Canadian Conservation Institute, Department of Canadian Heritage.

"In addition to the success of the scientific tests carried out on the Sanders portrait, recent genealogical evidence, together with a number of documents and letters that have been discovered over the past twenty years, go a long way to authenticate the portrait as being a true image of Shakespeare painted in his lifetime (1603) ."

The painting has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), the National Portrait Gallery (London, UK), and the Yale Center for British Art (Cambridge, Massachusetts).

The Sanders Portrait is currently in the collection of the John Rylands University Library at the University of Manchester, England.

Is the man in the Sanders Portrait the real William Shakespeare? We may never know.