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Shakespeare's Face
On May 11, 2001, Globe and Mail reporter Stephanie Nolen announced a stunning discovery to the world: an attractive portrait held by an Ontario family for twelve generations, which may well be the only known portrait of Shakespeare painted during his lifetime. Shakespeare’s Face is the biography of a portrait — a literary mystery story — and the furious debate that has ensued since its discovery.
A slip of paper affixed to the back proclaims “Shakespere. This likeness taken 1603, Age at that time 39 ys.” But is it really Shakespeare who peers at us from the small oil on wood painting? The twinkling eyes, reddish hair, and green jacket are not in keeping with the duller, traditional images of the bard. But they are more suggestive of the humorous and humane man who wrote the greatest plays in the English language.
Shakespeare’s Face tells the riveting story of how the painting came to reside in the home of a retired engineer in a mid-sized Ontario town. The painting is reputed to be by John Sanders of Worcester, England. As a retirement project, the engineer, whose grandmother kept the family treasure under her bed, embarked on authenticating the portrait: the forensic analyses that followed have proven it without doubt to the period.
In a remarkable publishing coup, Knopf Canada has gathered around Stephanie Nolen’s story a group of the world’s leading Shakespeare scholars and art and cultural historians to delve into one of the most fascinating literary mysteries of our times: “Is this the face of genius?”
Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Shakespeare’s Face by Stephanie Nolen
By the late afternoon I was beginning to go a little cross-eyed. I had examined countless documents and read the test results from the painting’s painstaking forensic analysis. I now had everything I needed to write my story — except for one crucial item. “Is he here?” I asked, almost in a whisper....
The owner laid the package carefully on the cluttered table. He gently pulled back the kraft paper wrapping, underneath which was a layer of bubble wrap. Then he peeled back this second layer to reveal his treasure.
I was caught off-guard by how small the portrait was — and how vivid. The colours in the paint seemed too rich to be 400 years old. Except for the hairline cracks in the varnish, the face could have been painted yesterday. And there was nothing austere or haughty about it, nothing of the great man being painted for posterity. It was a rogue’s face, a charmer’s face that looked back at me with a tolerant, mischievous slightly world-weary air....
It was painted on two pieces of solid board so expertly joined that the seam was barely visible. A date, “Ano 1603”, was painted in small red letters in the top right hand corner. The right side had been nibbled by woodworms.... I stood and gazed, quelling an instinctive urge to pick the portrait up and hold it in my hands. And as my professional skepticism crumpled for a moment, I found myself wanting desperately to believe that this was indeed Shakespeare’s face.
A slip of paper affixed to the back proclaims “Shakespere. This likeness taken 1603, Age at that time 39 ys.” But is it really Shakespeare who peers at us from the small oil on wood painting? The twinkling eyes, reddish hair, and green jacket are not in keeping with the duller, traditional images of the bard. But they are more suggestive of the humorous and humane man who wrote the greatest plays in the English language.
Shakespeare’s Face tells the riveting story of how the painting came to reside in the home of a retired engineer in a mid-sized Ontario town. The painting is reputed to be by John Sanders of Worcester, England. As a retirement project, the engineer, whose grandmother kept the family treasure under her bed, embarked on authenticating the portrait: the forensic analyses that followed have proven it without doubt to the period.
In a remarkable publishing coup, Knopf Canada has gathered around Stephanie Nolen’s story a group of the world’s leading Shakespeare scholars and art and cultural historians to delve into one of the most fascinating literary mysteries of our times: “Is this the face of genius?”
Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Shakespeare’s Face by Stephanie Nolen
By the late afternoon I was beginning to go a little cross-eyed. I had examined countless documents and read the test results from the painting’s painstaking forensic analysis. I now had everything I needed to write my story — except for one crucial item. “Is he here?” I asked, almost in a whisper....
The owner laid the package carefully on the cluttered table. He gently pulled back the kraft paper wrapping, underneath which was a layer of bubble wrap. Then he peeled back this second layer to reveal his treasure.
I was caught off-guard by how small the portrait was — and how vivid. The colours in the paint seemed too rich to be 400 years old. Except for the hairline cracks in the varnish, the face could have been painted yesterday. And there was nothing austere or haughty about it, nothing of the great man being painted for posterity. It was a rogue’s face, a charmer’s face that looked back at me with a tolerant, mischievous slightly world-weary air....
It was painted on two pieces of solid board so expertly joined that the seam was barely visible. A date, “Ano 1603”, was painted in small red letters in the top right hand corner. The right side had been nibbled by woodworms.... I stood and gazed, quelling an instinctive urge to pick the portrait up and hold it in my hands. And as my professional skepticism crumpled for a moment, I found myself wanting desperately to believe that this was indeed Shakespeare’s face.
384 pages, Hardcover
First published July 2, 2002
5 people are currently reading
46 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 17, 2014
I read this when it came out but I am posting it now to encourage others to read this fascinating book. Current information from 2013: the label, ink and glue on the back of the painting which identify the sitter as William Shakespeare, have been tested and proven to date between 1600-1640. Extensive research has been done on the family of the owner, further linking the owner's direct ancestor to Wm Shakespeare. See http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/mu...
for more information.
(If link doesn't work, search for "The Sanders Portrait")
for more information.
(If link doesn't work, search for "The Sanders Portrait")
July 20, 2019
I remember when this story broke in the Globe and Mail. Knowing enough of the story at the time, I chose not to get the book in 2002. Over the years I’ve forgotten much of the detail and I’m glad to have finally read it. The book reads much like a mystery novel. Stephanie Nolan’s approach is interesting, to say the least. She has Shakespearean experts and other professionals tell their roles in the uncovering the solution to the mystery. The portrait itself is consistent with its alleged age, but it’s the label chiefly that prevents a final verdict being given. No one can say whether or not it is a portrait of Shakespeare, but in the end it doesn’t change the fact that his plays and poems have endured and will continue to do so.
September 26, 2020
My rating might be influenced by my fascination with Shakespeare, but I think this multi-faceted collection of essays will appeal to loads of people, even those who give not a fig whether a painting owned by a retired Ontario engineer actually depicts the Bard of Avon.
The process of determining the authenticity of a portrait -- from the clues in the way the fabric is painted to the C-14 dating -- is absorbing.
Nolen, the report who brought this story to the Globe and Mail in the early 2000s, has wisely decided to let the experts -- the art historians, the chemists, the Shakespeare scholars, the archivists -- express their own views.
In the end, it doesn't change the plays if this is a real portrait. The process of the detective work is a fascinating read.
The process of determining the authenticity of a portrait -- from the clues in the way the fabric is painted to the C-14 dating -- is absorbing.
Nolen, the report who brought this story to the Globe and Mail in the early 2000s, has wisely decided to let the experts -- the art historians, the chemists, the Shakespeare scholars, the archivists -- express their own views.
In the end, it doesn't change the plays if this is a real portrait. The process of the detective work is a fascinating read.
August 28, 2020
Really good story about an interesting painting interweaved with (then) relatively contemporary Shakespeare scholarship. Would have liked an update in there, as it was published in 2002.
April 14, 2024
Reads like a mystery novel with no definite decision as to if it is a true painting of Shakespeare but it does not alter the fact why his plays and poems have endured for so long.
April 25, 2016
- I enjoyed this collection of essays, and book-long debate, regarding the verification of this 'found' portrait of Shakespeare.
- book quotes:
- "Why should the 'discovery' of what might be a portrait of William Shakespeare make it to the front page of the newspapers? Because, the answer will come, Shakespeare was the greatest writer in the history of the world."
- "After God," proclaimed Alexandre Dumas, the nineteenth-century French author "Shakespeare created most."
- "...the mythic and legendary nature of Shakespeare's narratives, the richness and density of his work, the self-sufficiency of his dramatic structures, his plays' susceptibility to cultural translation, and his theatrical openness. It is needless to say that he portrays situations that affect us all, both personally and politically, that he creates - or gives his actors the stimulus to represent - characters in whom we can believe, that he deals with fundamental human concerns - love and marriage, birth and death, relationships between levels of society, the need for good government on a personal and a national level. Many other dramatists do these things too, but Shakespeare is concerned not only with human beings in society, but also with our place in the universe. He is, in the most important sense of the word, a religious dramatist - not a proponent of any particular religion, but a writer who is aware, and makes his spectators aware, of the mystery of things, of humankind's' need to seek, however unavailingly, for an understanding of how we came to be on earth and how we should conduct ourselves now we are here."
- book quotes:
- "Why should the 'discovery' of what might be a portrait of William Shakespeare make it to the front page of the newspapers? Because, the answer will come, Shakespeare was the greatest writer in the history of the world."
- "After God," proclaimed Alexandre Dumas, the nineteenth-century French author "Shakespeare created most."
- "...the mythic and legendary nature of Shakespeare's narratives, the richness and density of his work, the self-sufficiency of his dramatic structures, his plays' susceptibility to cultural translation, and his theatrical openness. It is needless to say that he portrays situations that affect us all, both personally and politically, that he creates - or gives his actors the stimulus to represent - characters in whom we can believe, that he deals with fundamental human concerns - love and marriage, birth and death, relationships between levels of society, the need for good government on a personal and a national level. Many other dramatists do these things too, but Shakespeare is concerned not only with human beings in society, but also with our place in the universe. He is, in the most important sense of the word, a religious dramatist - not a proponent of any particular religion, but a writer who is aware, and makes his spectators aware, of the mystery of things, of humankind's' need to seek, however unavailingly, for an understanding of how we came to be on earth and how we should conduct ourselves now we are here."
September 13, 2021
Nolen was surprisingly introduced to the tale of the Sanders portrait by her parents; her father had stopped to chat with a neighbor, Lloyd Sullivan, one evening, and during the conversation, Sullivan told Nolen's father that his retirement plans came down to one thing, a portrait in his possession and passed down through generations of his family that was allegedly of the Bard himself, painted during his lifetime, when Shakespeare was 39 years old. So begins this very interesting journey through Sullivan's attempts to authenticate the painting; Nolen also has chapters written by various Shakespeare experts dissecting the pros and cons of the validity of the painting, which are interspersed with Sullivan's work. The owner spent tens of thousands of dollars having the Sanders portrait examined by experts, carbon dated, and inspected for technical painting methods which would have been used in Elizabethan times. The book also examines our relationship with Shakespeare on the whole, how he and his genius have informed our modern world, and how we do not truly know what the man looked like, how we put our own expectations onto the portraits done of him, most of which are posthumous. Experts still debate and dismiss the Sanders portrait, and Nolen's chronicling of Sullivan's journey was extremely interesting.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews