William Shakespeare
1 portrait of William Shakespeare
© National Portrait Gallery, London
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William Shakespeare
after Unknown artist
albumen print, possibly 19th century
16 in. x 13 in. (406 mm x 330 mm) paper size
Purchased with help from the Friends of the National Libraries and the Pilgrim Trust, 1966
Reference Collection
NPG D41645
Sitterback to top
- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Dramatist and poet. Sitter associated with 107 portraits.
Events of 1800back to top
Current affairs
Widespread food riots after poor harvests of 1798-9. Theorist, Thomas Malthus, controversially argues that poverty and food shortages are an inevitable consequence of population growth, challenging assumptions that populousness was a sign of national prosperity and power. His thesis contributed forcefully to the debate over the existing Poor Law.Art and science
William Wordsworth publishes his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads; a retrospective explanation of his experimental poems written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It becomes one of the best-known manifestos of Romantic literature.International
Lord Castlereagh, Chief Secretary for Ireland, is the main architect of the Act of Union under which Ireland is merged with Great Britain and the Irish parliament is abolished.British troops support successful uprising by Maltese against the French.
Napoleon is victorious against Austrians at Marengo and reconquers Italy.
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Lee Durkee
28 September 2019, 00:56
This portrait is obviously based on the Hunt (or Stratford) portrait of Shakespeare, which is interesting because there's a very important copy of that portrait, known as the Rabone copy, that has gone missing from Birmingham. A man named Malone discovered the Hunt in a Stratford attic in 1860. He made a copy of the original from a photograph he took before the Hunt portrait was sent to London, where the original portrait was altered (in both face and pose) in a disappointing manner. The Rabone copy has since disappeared.
The renowned 19th century scholar CM Ingleby (author of Shakespeare's Bones, etc) declared, “This [the Hunt] is not in its original state, and cannot be judged of apart from a copy of it in the possession of John Rabone, Esq., of Birmingham.” And here is the Birmingham Gazette’s description of the now lost Rabone copy: . . . a finely-executed painting in oil, the same size as the Stratford portrait, which he [Rabone] had had painted many years ago in the lines of the photograph of it after it had been “cleaned,” and before its “restoration.” In the course of the latter process, he said, the Stratford picture had been sadly altered. He pointed out that the pose of the figure in his picture, while it perfectly agreed with the first photograph, was very different to that in the Stratford picture as it now is . . . the painter, had successfully caught and reproduced the nobleness of expression seen in the first photograph, which was entirely wanting in the “restored” picture."
It would not surprise me at all if the provenance of this portrait is Birmingham. If it's the Rabone copy then it's an important portrait because the Hunt portrait itself has never been debunked, just ignored, and might very well have been a portrait of Shakespeare ad vivum. Please do let me know if you think this portrait might be the Rabone copy. Thanks.