A UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY

John Donne, Elizabethan Poet
By an unknown English artist, c.1595

© Courtesy of the Executors
of the estate of the late
Lord Lothian

John Donne Appeal

Chronology of the
life of John Donne

Poetry by John Donne

One of the most talented writers of his age, Donne produced a remarkable body of work encompassing metaphysical poetry, verse letters, essays and sermons that came to be widely celebrated following general publication after his death. Born into a devout Roman Catholic family, he was educated from before the age of twelve at the University of Oxford. In 1592, he was admitted to the Inns of Court, where he undertook legal training and began to write poetry that drew on both spiritual and classical sources. Ben Jonson held the view that Donne had written all his best poetry before the age of twenty-Þve: this dramatic portrait of Donne, playing the role of a melancholic lover, dates from this early period of intense creativity.

In 1601, he entered into a clandestine marriage with Ann More (1584-1617), the niece of his employer Thomas Egerton (1540-1617). Although the marriage was a love match, the union was a disaster for Donne's career. He found himself briefly imprisoned and stripped of his post as Egerton's secretary and for several years the couple survived on charity from friends and relatives. Some time in the 1590s he gradually became drawn to the Protestant religion. In 1615 he was ordained as a minister of the Church of England and he later became the Dean of St Paul's, London.

This remarkable image, one of the earliest surviving examples of an Elizabethan author portrait, owes much to the Italian style of self-presentation. It shows Donne in a self-conscious pose, his head set back in the shadows, topped by a wide-brimmed hat. Expensive lace collars are left open and untied at the neck, perhaps in a pun on the author's name (that is, 'unDonne') and as an affectation of the fashionable literary disposition of melancholy.1 Donne was closely involved in commissioning the composition and it has been argued that the painting 'is as much a product of Donne's creative imagination as the Satires and the early Elegies.'

The X-ray reveals that a lip and an eye were repainted in a lower position - early changes made by the original artist. That the composition may have originally been painted for a lover or close friend is suggested by the inscription, itself a reworking of a psalm, 'O Lady, lighten our darkness'. Donne's friend Thomas Morton, Bishop of Durham (1564-1659), noted a portrait of Donne in the chambers of one of Donne's close friends at Lincoln's Inn, 'all envelloed with a darkish shadow, his face and feature hardly discernable' with an inscription domine illumine tenebras meas. This encounter probably occurred before 1596 when Donne and his friends apparently left the Inns of Court, and although the inscription does not exactly match the existing one on this portrait, it seems likely that Morton's description relates to this image or another early version of it. One theory is that the portrait was in the chamber of Donne's close friend and fellow student Christopher Brooke (c.1570­1628). As has been noted, around this time Donne wrote several verse letters to friends (including Brooke) referring to 'loves hot fires, which maryr [martyr] my sad minde' and the object of his attentions is described as a woman residing in the north of England, who Donne refers to as the 'saint of his affection'. It has been suggested that this may have been Brooke's sister who was then living in York.

A similar picture, described in Donne's will, was left to his friend Robert Ker, later 1st Earl of Ancrum (1578­1654): 'I give to my honourable and faithful friend Mr Robert Karr of his Majesties Bedchamber that Picture of myne wch is taken in Shaddowes and was made very many yeares before I was of this profession [i.e. a minister].' For many years the portrait was lost, but in 1959 it was rediscovered in the Ancrum family collection after it had been mislabelled as the medieval poet 'Duns Scotus'.

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All images and text are subject to copyright protection. 25 July 2008