This far-famed picture, believed to be the only genuine portrait of the
poet, was bought at the sale at Stowe, in the autumn of 1848, by the
Earl of Ellesmere, for 355 guineas. Its history, as stated in the
_Athenæum_ shortly after the period of the sale, is as follows:--“The
Duke of Chandos obtained it by marriage with the daughter and heiress of
a Mr. Nicholl, of Minchenden House, Southgate; Mr. Nicholl obtained it
from a Mr. Robert Keck, of the Inner Temple, who gave (the first and
best) Mrs. Barry, the actress, as Oldys tells us, forty guineas for it.
Mrs. Barry had it from Betterton, and Betterton had it from Sir William
Davenant, who was a professed admirer of Shakspeare, and not unwilling
to be thought his son. Davenant was born in 1605, and died in 1668; and
Betterton, (as every reader of Pepys will recollect,) was the great
actor, belonging to the Duke’s Theatre, of which Davenant was the
patentee. The elder brother of Davenant, (Parson Robert,) had been heard
to relate, as Aubrey informs us, that Shakspeare had often kissed Sir
William when a boy.
“Davenant lived quite near enough to Shakspeare’s time to have obtained
a genuine portrait of the poet whom he admired--in an age, too, when the
Shakspeare mania was not so strong as it is now. There is no doubt that
this was the portrait which Davenant believed to be like Shakspeare, and
which Kneller, before 1692, copied and presented to glorious John
Dryden, who repaid the painter with one of the best of his admirable
epistles.
“The Chandos Shakspeare is a small portrait on canvas, 22 inches long by
18 broad. The face is thoughtful, the eyes are expressive, and the hair
is of a brown black. The dress is black, with a white turnover collar,
the strings of which are loose. There is a small gold ring in the left
ear. We have had an opportunity of inspecting it both before and after
the sale, and in the very best light, and have no hesitation in saying
that the copies we have seen of it are very far from like. It agrees in
many respects--the short nose especially--with the Stratford bust, and
is not more unlike the engraving before the first folio--or the Gerard
Johnson bust on the Stratford monument--than Raeburn’s Sir Walter Scott
is unlike Sir Thomas Lawrence’s--or West’s Lord Byron unlike the better
known portrait by Phillips. It has evidently been touched upon; the
yellow oval that surrounds it has a look of Kneller’s age.”
The opinion of the writer in the _Athenæum_ is, that the Chandos picture
is not the original for which Shakspeare sat, but a copy made for Sir
William Davenant from some known and acknowledged portrait of the poet.