A portrait of Shakespeare that has been in the collection of the Royal
Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon since 1892 has secretly been
replaced by a 19th-century fake during the past decade, a German scholar
claims.
Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel said that the famous portrait, The Flower,
was not the original that she examined between 1995 and 2005 and which was
among the very few reliable likenesses of the playwright.
Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel said yesterday that the original had been
substituted by a copy. In 2005 it was sent to the laboratories of the
National Portrait Gallery and dismissed as a 19th century forgery after it
was found to contain chrome yellow, a colour that was commercially available
only from 1814 onwards.
“Where is the priceless 400-year-old original Flower portrait?”
asked the professor, who lectures in English literature at the University of
Mainz.
She said that she was basing her conclusions on tests that she carried out on
what she says was the original – which she she last saw in 1996 – and on the
version that she claims is a copy, which she saw in January.
She indicated that evidence found in X-rays and photographs, and the support
of Viennese experts in the Old Masters and forensic science, gave weight to
the theory. But the RSC and NPG have said that any perceived differences are
caused by lighting conditions and different equipment.
Professor Hammerschmidt-Hum-mel said that she became suspicious after her
German publishers contacted the RSC and requested a transparency of the
portrait for reproduction in her forthcoming book. She said that they
received a picture that she claimed was “strikingly different” from the one
supplied by the company in 1996.
She commissioned scientific tests from Reinhardt Altmann, an expert at the
German Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigation.She said: “Altmann concluded
that the picture provided in 2002 must be a copy. Professor Wolf-gang
Speyer, of the University of Salz-burg and an expert on Old Masters,
confirmed the differences between the two pictures.”
She said that the wood of the painting’s panel in Stratford was in sharp
contrast to that of the original. Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel said: “It
had already been described in these terms by British experts at the end of
the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, among them the directors
of the National Portrait Gallery.”
The edges of the portrait examined in January were “solid, showing no signs of
wormwood damage . . . [and] the peripheral areas, which in the original
painting are brittle and have been broken or chipped away in places, exhibit
no such damage in the portrait inspected in the RSC depository”.
She noted that the original had a deep crack, whereas the alleged copy had “an
imitated crack”. David Howells, the curator of the RSC collection, said that
the crack “doesn’t appear to be identical. It’s not there as she remembers
seeing it, but that was over ten years ago.”
An X-ray examination in 1966 by the Courtauld Institute of Art revealed that a
painting of a Madonna and the Christ child from the late 15th or early 16th
century lay beneath the portrait.
Professor Hammerschmidt-Hum-mel said: “In the older X-ray, the outline of the
right-hand side of the Madonna’s head runs through Shakespeare’s left eye,
close to the nasal side of the pupil. The new X-ray mistakenly has what
appears to be the bridge of the Madonna’s nose bisecting Shakespeare’s left
eye. The conclusion must be that the Madonna beneath the portrait is a poor
imitation and it follows that the portrait is not genuine.”
Both the RSC and the portrait gallery rejected the claims. A spokes-woman for
the RSC said that the only time the painting had not been on display under
CCTV coverage in the RSC Collection Gallery was when it was in a secure
store room. Dr Tarnya Cooper, the portrait gallery’s 16th century curator,
said: “The idea that this picture has been substituted for a different
portrait between 1996 and 2005 is plainly nonsensical . . . Any perceived
differences between photographs are likely to be caused by differences in
lighting conditions.”
Stanley Wells, Britain’s foremost Shakespeare scholar, condemned Professor
Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s claims as “disgraceful”. He claimed that she was
trying to counter the evidence against the painting’s authenticity,
following the NPG’s research, and added that many books written on
Shakespeare contained “lunatic theories”. He said of Professor
Ham-merschmidt-Hummel: “She knows her way round the archives, but she barks
continually up the wrong tree. At least she’s not saying Shakespeare didn’t
write Shakespeare.”
Chaucer Press will be publishing Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s findings in The
Life and Times of William Shakespeare on November 5.
Centuries of forgery, feud and fantasy
— Academics have argued for centuries over the authorship of
Shakespeare’s works; the philosopher Francis Bacon, the nobleman Edward de
Vere and the playwright Christopher Marlowe are among suggested candidates
— A former physics teacher from Cheshire published a book this year
claiming that the works were written by the unknown illegitimate son of
Elizabeth I. Robert Nield argued that anagrams in the sonnets show their
author to be William Hastings, who he believes was the illegitimate child of
Elizabeth and Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester
— Lloyd Sullivan, a Canadian, recently produced a portrait dated 1603
and labelled “Shakespeare” which his family had kept under the bed. Analysis
showed it was not forged, and was painted in the 17th century, but the
identity of the sitter was not proved
— John Payne Collier (1789-1883), an early newspaper reporter, was
caught out attempting to forge notes by Shakespeare in a carefully studied
16th-century hand
— The most famous fakery came courtesy of William Henry Ireland, an
18th-century teenage forger whose works became hugely valuable in their own
right. Ireland duped the elite with his astonishing “discovery” of a cache
of documents. He wrote letters revealing correspondence between Shakespeare
and Elizabeth I, and Anne Hathaway (accompanied by a lock of her hair), as
well as sanitised versions of Hamlet and King Lear. He was
exposed when he unearthed a copy of a previously unknown play. It was so bad
that the game was finally up
