Hallo! I have a question for you related to James, Duke of Monmouth, bastard son of Charles II, king of England. After the death of Charles II he rebelled against his uncle, king James II, but failed and was beheaded (rather messily, I heard).
But my question has to do with what happened afterwards. Apparently somebody realised, after he had been executed, that there was no official portrait of the Duke of Monmouth. A bastard and a traitor he might have been, but he was the son of a king, and it was unthinkable that there shouldn’t be a portrait. So they tell me that his head was sewn back to his body and his lifeless corpse was propped up for a portrait, which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Can this be true?! I was told this very much in earnest by a good British friend who appeared to be very knowledgeable and a reliable source, but I guess (in retrospect), after talking to others, that he might have been pulling my leg to extraordinary lengths. However, weirder things have happened in this world.
Maybe the portrait was posthumous, but did not involve any kind of “avant-la-lettre” IKEA-style corpse assembly, requiring instead only the head to be set up in front of the artist, who would paint it and later add a “standard” body for it (but if that had been the case, man… The painter in question must have had a rather strong stomach, I guess).
That there was a lack of ‘official’ portraits of him is easily disproved. The leading London portrait painters of the day - Lely, Cooper, Kneller, Wissing - had all painted him and there is no shortage of surviving versions. His senior descendant, the Duke of Buccleuch, alone has at least half a dozen of them. (The Buccleuch equestrian portrait at Boughton, which is what is used to illustrate the Wiki entry, is particularly splendid.)
The story arose simply because the man in the National Portrait Gallery portrait looks vaguely like Monmouth and that’s mainly because he’s wearing a wig of roughly the right period. Deathbed portraits are a distinctive genre in seventeenth-century English art, so there is no need to suppose that there is anything special about this particular example.
