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The Sanders Painting
Whats up with the Sanders Painting? Is it really, as the owner Loyd Sullivan is claiming, a long-lost portrait of the bard? Toronto Globe and Mail journalist Stephanie Nolen, who first broke the story of the Sanders portrait over a year ago, is the editor of a new volume, Shakespeare's Face, which presents the case that it is. The book is reviewed by Paul Altrocchi in the Fall 2002 issue of Shakespeare Matters and by Roger Stritmatter at Amazon.com
This article summarizes the relevant findings of the November 2002 symposium held at Trinity College University of Toronto at which distinguished panelists debated and discussed the Sullivan claim in great detail.
Study of the painting by the Canadian Conservation Institute has established that, contrary to the 1908 opinion of M.H. Speilmann, the painting does date to 1603.
Unfortunately for Sullivan, almost everything else about the painting suggests that it is not an authentic portrait of the bard: although a paper label affixed to the back of the painting identifies it as a likeness of Shakespeare, the wooden panel which would would have originally included the sitter's age in 1603 is, as Tarnya Cooper, the Assistant curator of the College Art Collection at University College in London, insisted, conveniently missing. Although CCI conservationist Marie-Claude Corbeil tried to attribute the missing 2" of the painting to worm damage, the surviving structure of the painting confirms that an entire panel is missing from the painting's right side.
Whether this absence is a result of design or historical accident is of course unkowable and, ultimately, moot: The only evidence suggesting that the painting actually represents the bard is a faded paper label including information, such as Shakspere's death date April 23 1616, which did not become part of the public record until 1773.
All relevant evidence suggests that the label dates from the late 18th century at the earliest, contrary to the flawed case presented by REED contributors to Nolan's book, as University of Western Ontario Professor Alan Somerset made clear in his devastating analysis at the University of Toronto Sanders symposium. As Somerset observed in his conference paper, "Label Me a Skeptic," the most likely hypothesis given all the facts is that the label was placed on the portrait circa 1780.
Professor Somerset charitably went out of his way to presume that the label was the result of honest intentions. But of course, as he points out elsewhere in his essay, the 18th century "was the great age of literary forgeries," the age in which William Henry Ireland hornswoggled James Boswell with his Shakespeare forgeries. It seems at least as likely that the label was a con job by someone eager to make a quick sale to one of Mr. Sullivan's ancestors.
Already in Nolen's book, five of seven distinguished contributors express serious reservations about identifying the sitter with the bard. The verdict of the conference, conveniently ommitted from Ms. Nolen's curiously prejudicial coverage, was even less reassuring to the wealthy buyers who, Mr. Sullivan's lawyer assures us, are anxious to pay large sums of money for the prestige of owning this attractive painting of an unknown man.