Flower portrait

The Flower portrait is a name of one of the painted portraits of William Shakespeare. 2005 investigation of the portrait lead to conclusion that it was painted in the 1800s.

The name originates with one of its previous owners, Sir Desmond Flower, who gave it to the Royal Shakespeare Company. The painting depicts Shakespeare gazing out of the picture and wearing a wide white collar. The painting has a signed date of 1609, but many art experts had been suspicious of it provenance before.

The picture has been commonly used, for example, in the covers of Shakespeare's published plays. It is similar to the Droeshout engraving, that appeared 1623 in the first folio publication of Shakespeare's plays and is effectively its copy.

In 2004 experts of the National Portrait Gallery of the UK investigated three portraits of Shakespeare in preparation for the 150th anniversary exhibition due to begin in March 2 2006. In April 21 2005 investigators announced that the painting is not contemporary to Shakespeare.

Most of the pigments on the painting are those that were available at the 17th century but the golden braid of the doublet was painted with chrome yellow, pigment which had been used around 1814. The particles of the chrome yellow are part of the normal layer of paint, meaning that it was not painted afterwards. Therefore Tarnya Cooper, one of the curators of the Gallery, announced that the painting is a 19th century forgery, dating around 1818-1840.

The painting was painted on top of a sixteenth-century painting that depicts a Madonna and child with John the Baptist [Yale Center for British Art] .

References

External links

* [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4471515.stm "BBC" - Flower portrait "is a fake"]
* [http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/04/22/world/main690086.shtml "CBS" - Shakespeare Portrait Is A Fake]