page_title: Chandos portrait
section_title: Authorship and provenance
hierarchical_section_title: Chandos portrait / Authorship and provenance
caption_attribution_description: English: A Restoration period painting of Shakespeare made after the Chandos.
context_page_description: The Chandos portrait is the most famous of the portraits that may depict William Shakespeare. Painted between 1600 and 1610, it may have served as the basis for the engraved portrait of Shakespeare used in the First Folio in 1623. It is named after the Dukes of Chandos, who formerly owned the painting. The portrait was given to the National Portrait Gallery, London on its foundation in 1856, and it is listed as the first work in its collection.
  It has not been possible to determine with certainty who painted the portrait, nor whether it really depicts Shakespeare. However, the National Portrait Gallery believes that it probably does depict the writer.
context_section_description: It has been claimed that Shakespeare's friend Richard Burbage (1567–1619) painted the Chandos portrait,  but the first known reference to the painting is in a note written in 1719 by George Vertue, who states that it was painted by John Taylor, a respected member of the Painter-Stainers' company who may also have been the same John Taylor who acted with the Children of Paul's. Vertue refers to Taylor as an actor and painter and as Shakespeare's "intimate friend". Katherine Duncan-Jones argues that 'John Taylor' could have been a misreading of what had originally been "Jo: Taylor"; she suggests that this may refer to the actor Joseph Taylor, who was a protégé of the older Shakespeare. 
  Vertue also states that before the Duke of Chandos acquired it, the portrait was owned by Shakespeare's possible godson, William Davenant (1606–1668), who, according to the gossip chronicler John Aubrey, claimed to be the playwright's illegitimate son. He also states that it was left to Davenant in Taylor's will and that it was bought by Thomas Betterton from Davenant and then sold to the lawyer Robert Keck, a collector of Shakespeare memorabilia.
  After Keck's death in 1719, it passed to his daughter, and was inherited by John Nichol, who married into the Keck family. Nichol's daughter Margaret married James Brydges, 3rd Duke of Chandos. The painting passed through descent within the Chandos title until Richard Temple-Grenville, 2nd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos sold it to the Earl of Ellesmere in 1848. Ellesmere donated it to the National Portrait Gallery.
caption: The "Soest Portrait" of Shakespeare.
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