page_title: Cobbe portrait
section_title: Support
hierarchical_section_title: Cobbe portrait / Support
caption_attribution_description: English: version of the Janssen portrait before cleaning in 1988
context_page_description: The Cobbe portrait is an early Jacobean panel painting of a gentleman which has been argued to be a life portrait of William Shakespeare. It is displayed at Hatchlands Park in Surrey, a National Trust property, and the portrait is so-called because of its ownership by Charles Cobbe, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin. There are numerous early copies of the painting, most of which were once identified as Shakespeare. The Cobbe original was only identified in the collection of the Anglo-Irish Cobbe family in 2006, and had until then been completely unknown to the world. Evidence uncovered by researchers at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust led to the claim, presented in March 2009, that the portrait is of William Shakespeare and painted from life. Many scholars dismiss this theory and have provided evidence to identify the portrait as one of Sir Thomas Overbury. The portrait has been the centrepiece of two exhibitions dedicated to it: Shakespeare Found: a Life Portrait at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon, from April–October 2009 and The Changing Face of William Shakespeare at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, from February–May 2011.
context_section_description: Support for the identification is drawn from several strands of evidence:
  The portrait descended in the Cobbe family together with a portrait of Shakespeare's patron, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton – the person most likely to have commissioned a portrait of Shakespeare – and they were inherited by Archbishop Cobbe through his cousin's wife, Southampton's great-granddaughter, who inherited Wriothesley heirlooms.
  At least five early copies of the Cobbe portrait have long traditions as representing Shakespeare: in the case of one of them, the 'Janssen' portrait in the Folger Shakespeare Library (Washington, D.C.), the tradition is claimed to date to within living memory of Shakespeare. This is one of the longest Shakespeare traditions attaching to any oil portrait. Furthermore, the existence of so many early copies indicates that the sitter was a man of fame.
  The Cobbe portrait is inscribed with the words Principum amicitias!, meaning 'the alliances of princes!', a quotation from Horace in an ode addressed to a man who was, among other things, a playwright (see below).
  The Cobbe portrait, and even more so the Janssen copy, bears a compositional similarity with the Droeshout engraving published in the First Folio of 1623.   The original or copy may have been a source for the engraving.
  Scientific testing has shown that the portrait is painted on a panel of English oak sometime after 1595; the form of the collar suggests a painting date of around 1610.
  Both the Cobbe portrait and the Janssen copy received alterations, in particular to the hairline. In the Cobbe original, this alteration made the sitter look younger, and the copies of the Cobbe received this younger hairline.  The later state of the Janssen was significantly aged compared with either version of the Cobbe, suggesting that the alteration was made either late in the sitter's life or after his death.  A second "bald" copy of the Cobbe, originally owned by the Marquess of Dorchester, also exists.
  The identification has received support from Shakespeare scholars Stanley Wells, Henry Woudhuysen, Jay L. Halio, Stuart Sillars, and Gregory Doran, chief associate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and art historians Alastair Laing, curator of paintings and sculpture at the National Trust, and Paul Joannides, professor of Art History at Cambridge.
  Supporters of the Shakespeare identification reject the arguments for Overbury. Research using tracings by Rupert Featherstone at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge, has led him to conclude that the Cobbe portrait and the only documented portrait of Overbury in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, depict two different sitters.
  Since the publicity surrounding it, the portrait has appeared on the covers of several books, and even inspired the Chinese author Zhang Yiyi to have a series of cosmetic surgeries to have his face transformed into that of Shakespeare.
caption: The altered balding hairline in the "original" Janssen portrait, as it appeared when purchased by the Folger Shakespeare Library in the early 1930s
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