Shakespeare would then have been 39, but there is no clear record of such an actor. (The painting is the centerpiece of a traveling exhibition and a book, Shakespeare’s Face-both appearing next year-on the Bard’s elusive image.) This rendering came to light only this May, brought forth by a Canadian engineer who asserts that this purported likeness of Shakespeare, possibly the only portrait of the playwright created during his lifetime, has been in his family these 400 years, having been painted in 1603 by John Sanders, thought to have been a minor actor in Shakespeare’s company. Now comes the so-called Sanders portrait, reproduced here on the magazine page for the first time in its original splendor. There is also the bust on his church tomb in Stratford-upon-Avon, rather bland, and the disputed Chandos portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, London, which scarcely resembles the Folio engraving or the tomb sculpture, since its subject appears to be more Italian or Spanish than English. This Shakespeare is high-foreheaded, long-nosed, and commonplace, if not plain.
When we visualize Shakespeare, we tend to remember the print by Martin Droeshout used for the frontispiece of the First Folio of the plays (1623), seven years after the dramatist’s death, presumably taken from a sketch now lost.
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