BBC article - Shakespeare’s portrait is a fake.
I’ve read about this happening moer than once: some 16th century (or pick your century of choice) artist-type picks up an older canvas with a painting on it and then paints something else over it.
Why? Were canvases particularly hard to come by in the days of yore? Was it some sort of ultimate critique of the previous artists work? “Your painteeng, it steenks so baad, zat I paint my own on eet! A-ha!”
Why would they do that?
Pretty much, yes (not that I have a cite to back me up). No one becomes an artist for the money afterall, and if you had some old paintings lying around that weren’t selling, it’s quite likely you’d think about reusing the canvas for a more popular and saleable subject.
OB
I suspect canvas wasn’t particularly cheap. And people didn’t generally see any point in keeping ‘old things’ purely for posterity - if they didn’t like it, it could go.
In this specific case, it’s a 19th-century painting attempting to pass as having been made in Shakespeare’s lifetime. The artist may have figured the deception would be less likely to be detected if he used a canvas dating from the right period.
There’s nothing wrong with painting over an inferior canvas, particularly if it was a student work or a mass-produced item of religious kitsch. I suspect that back then portraits of the Madonna were rather common. Just because a canvas got recycled doesn’t automatically mean that it’s a lost Caravaggio.
Also to consider is that a “canvas” also involves the stretcher and very often a nice gesso undercoat. This takes time and resources to fabricate, and it’s totally understandable why a less than well-funded artist might grab what he thought was no masterpiece for the ages, and try and make a better picture on it. Particularly if the crappy painting was an earlier attempt, leaning up in a corner of his own studio.
The ‘Flower Portrait’ is actually painted on a wooden panel, not canvas, but that doesn’t really alter the argument.
Usually when an artist painted over an existing painting it was one of his own. Why just dump a painting you didn’t like, had left unfinished or couldn’t sell when it could be reused? It wasn’t so much that canvases or panels were hard to come by, more that they weren’t especially cheap and needed to be specially prepared.
As 42fish says, if it was repainted in the early nineteenth century, we’re talking forgery and using old materials is one of the forger’s most basic tricks. The calculation would really have been quite simple - in the early nineteenth century the value of a bog-standard ‘Madonna and Child’ from the sixteenth century would been limited and certainly nowhere near that of an ‘authentic’ portrait of Shakespeare.
Which does nothing to explain the proliferation of gas station velvet Elvis “paintings” here in the United States.
It would be a heavy burden indeed, to have to explain why there is so much crap in the world, and why some people like it so much.
Velvet, by the way, lacks most of the recyclable qualities of canvas.
**“Fake” ** Is it really a fake? Wrongly dated, maybe, but a fake?
Did someone create it with the specific intent of passing it off as a 16th Century portrait? Or did some artist paint it in the 19th century, and later someone mistakenly assumed it was 16th Century?
The fact that it has the painted inscription ‘Willm Shakespeare 1609’ on it is a good reason for thinking that whoever painted it wanted it to be seen as a genuine portrait of Shakespeare painted in 1609.
It could be argued that the inscription was added later. But there is no doubt that the portrait is meant to be Shakespeare as it is identical to the image of him in the famous Droeshout engraving from the First Folio. We are meant to assume that this is the painting which Droeshout copied. If the inscription was added later, it is possible that the painting was produced in the early nineteenth century as a modern painting of Shakespeare. It is even possible that it was a copy of a portrait that has since been lost, although one might wonder why no one else has ever come across that original. But in either of those scenarios, the painter probably wouldn’t have used an old panel, or indeed a panel at all. That alone makes it far more likely that the painting was intended to deceive.
It’s worth adding that the 19th century history of the painting is relatively murky. The first known owner, H.C. Clements, claimed to have acquired it from a dealer c.1840, but there’s really only his word for that. Clements also claimed to believe that it was an authentic 1609 portrait of Shakespeare that he’d discovered, but doesn’t seem to have sought to profit from this. It’s only after his death at the end of the century, when Flower then becomes the owner, that a fuss is made about it.
Aside from it being difficult to believe that that dealer hadn’t twigged to what the picture is meant to be, at least one aspect of the Clements story is suspicious. He recorded that it’d been on public display and widely viewed prior to him buying it, but there’s no other record of this, even though one could reasonably expect there to be.
One presumes that the forthcoming NPG exhibition will at least try to shed new light on Clements and the provenance.