The painting selected to illustrate William
Shakespeare in the December issue (Encounters) is captioned: “A c1610 painting of William Shakespeare, kept in the Cobbe Collection, is thought to be the only portrait of the English playwright to have been taken from life.”
However, the Cobbe portrait (left) has never been proven to depict Shakespeare – and, in all likelihood, doesn’t. Research by Tarnya Cooper, former chief curator of the National Portrait Gallery, has shown that it is almost certainly a painting of the poet Sir Thomas Overbury, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s. Compare the Cobbe portrait to the portrait of Overbury by the Flemish painter Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger and there is very little doubt that they portray the same sitter.
The only confirmed portraits of Shakespeare that exist today are the Droeshout portrait, which appears in the First Folio, and the bust on his funerary monument in Stratford-upon-Avon. Even the famous Chandos portrait, which is more widely accepted to depict the bard, has never been definitively proven. However, the scarcely publicised Sanders portrait, which bears a contemporary label identifying the subject as a 39-year-old Shakespeare, has one of the best claims to being a painting of the playwright ‘taken from life’.