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Imagine John Sanders putting down his brush, the end still wet with a dark-blue paint, stiff from the egg white mixed in the pigment. Imagine him stepping back from the easel in his small home in Worcester on a warm day in mid-May in 1603, and admiring his handiwork. When the painting has dried to its oak square, he turns it over to affix a small piece of rag linen inscribed, "Shakspere, Born April 23 1564," leaves the next line blank, then adds, "This Likeness taken 1603, Age at that time 39 ys."
He hangs the picture on the wall, only taking it down 13 years later to fill in the blank line: "Died April 23 1616, Aged 52." He puts it back on the wall, or in a trunk, and leaves it to his eldest son after his own death in 1637. That playwright from nearby Stratford, once a friend of his, is getting to be well known, Sanders might remind his son, so hold on to the painting -- it might be worth something someday.
John Sanders's son did just that, and so did 12 generations of Sanders sons, and by the 1960s the painting lay under the bed of a woman in Montreal, where her grandson used to see the corners of the packet sticking out and hear his relatives argue over whether to keep or sell that picture of the poet from Stratford -- who did, indeed, turn out to be rather well known.
When he grew up and retired, that grandson decided to investigate the painting's many mysteries: Is it really Shakespeare, and painted in 1603? He spent his savings to seek answers to those questions. Now, the answers promise to change his life, as well as the state of Shakespeare scholarship.
But how did what might be the only extant portrait made of Shakespeare in his lifetime end up in the hands of his Ontario family?
The Sanders family prospered in England, and a talent for painting ran through the generations. Another John Sanders was a fellow of the Royal Academy in the 1800s, and had his work in galleries. But in the early years of this century, the Sanders patriarch decided that better fortunes were to be had in the colonies. He brought the clan, and a trove of 300 works he had painted, collected or inherited, to Montreal.
This picture was just one in the collection. It came with the identifying linen label, now illegible (though readable under fluorescent light), and a wonderful story that it was painted by a relative who acted with Shakespeare and dabbled in portraiture.
But the family thought that must be a myth, because in 1909 the painting was taken to a London expert, one A. M. Spielmann, who examined it and said, regrettably, that it couldn't be Shakespeare. It wasn't nearly old enough. Still a nice piece of work, though. And so it went back in the cupboard and, later, into a trunk shipped to Montreal.
On the patriarch's death, the painting went to his oldest son, along with the story of its creation. The son and his 12 siblings would gather in Grandmother's kitchen on Saturday nights, and debate endlessly: Keep it? Sell it? Exhibit it?
The painting, meanwhile, sat beneath Grandmother's bed, wrapped in brown paper. Periodically, a tidy son would threaten to chuck it out during spring cleaning. In about 1960, the eldest son was instructed to take it to a gallery. The picture was exhibited under the family's assertion that it was a portrait of Shakespeare. A Montreal dealer offered $100,000; the son told a newspaper that he might use the money to go around the world -- a declaration that infuriated his siblings. The offer of money ignited fierce debate in the family. In the end, one sister (the current owner's mother), always the peacemaker, prevailed, convincing them the painting should stay in the family.
On the uncle's death, it came back to that same sister, who stashed it in a cupboard. On her death, she left it to her only child, the present owner.
The painting survived floods and fires and spring cleanings, perhaps because, regardless of its subject, it is a bewitching piece of art. Somewhere along the way worms got to it, leaving a series of gouges in the top, and possibly chewing away the bottom inch that included a signature. But the family has always been relatively well-off, and so the portrait was treasured, never sold to pay off a mortgage, gambling debts or doctor's bills.
The current owner hung it on his dining-room wall for a while, until his wife redecorated and poor old Shakespeare didn't match, and then he went into a closet -- or was it the basement? The owner was a busy man, an engineer who frequently put in 18-hour days, with kids to raise and plenty of church and charity work to do. His mother told him that the painting's history should be his retirement project, and he figured he would get to it eventually.
"I thought, damn it, when I retire and I've got nothing to do, I'm gonna research this," he says. "I'm not going to sit in a rocking chair and read newspapers. And, I mean, nobody in the family moved the yardsticks on this in the whole 400 years."
He could not have imagined, then, what he was getting into. The project he began 10 years ago has since consumed his life savings, produced a pile of paper that threatens to overwhelm the second storey of his house, and made him a late-in-life scholar of Shakespeare, versed in the most obscure arcana of the Elizabethan giant's life and work.
The owner is not a man with any previous knowledge of art. Above his living-room sofa hangs the ubiquitous type of living-room painting, a red barn beneath a somewhat lurid sunset. But he recruited to the cause a lawyer friend of the family, another one-time novice now intimately versed in art history and carbon dating. They spent weeknights and weekends in the local university library, poring over historical texts and looking for clues.
Like most everyone else, they always thought they knew what Shakespeare looked like, and initially they hoped their portrait would match some of the others. But early in their research, they discovered that there is intense scholarly controversy over the other portraits. In the 1850s, a pair of rogues called Holder and Zincke launched a cottage industry in Shakespeare portraits, putting a ruff here and a doublet there on dusty pictures of Lord This and Earl That, then selling their "discoveries" for heaps of money. Nobody knew any better. But today, scientific dating techniques instantly identify such fakes.
The other serious contenders are portraits known by the names of their owners -- the Flower, the Grafton, the Chandos. Most have been discredited by the new tests; the exception, the Chandos, hangs in London's National Portrait Gallery. An X-ray of the Flower picture found a Madonna and Child beneath it; other pictures were found under fluorescent light to have been altered (some to look more like other, more credible portraits of Shakespeare) years after they were first painted.
Only two images are, in the opinions of orthodox scholars, true likenesses, and both were completed after Shakespeare's death. There is a bust on his tomb in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford, a somewhat crude affair carved by a stonemason, not a sculptor, but which appears to have been approved by Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway.
And then there is a print done by the artist Martin Droeshout for the frontispiece of the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, published in 1623. That engraving seems to have been made from a drawing that may have been sketched while Shakespeare was alive, but that drawing does not survive.
In 1993, the Sanders portrait owner used a family connection to arrange a meeting with Anthony Chricton-Stuart, of the Old Masters department at Christie's auction house in New York. Chricton-Stuart said the painting was in excellent condition, the owner recalls, and would likely go for at least $100,000 at auction, regardless of its subject. But if it could be authenticated as Shakespeare, he said, it was likely worth millions.
(Around the same time, a family friend who knew of the painting heard that Vanessa Redgrave was coming to a nearby city for a performance and called her manager, offering to let her view what was perhaps the only life portrait of Shakespeare. The offer was accepted, but Redgrave was forced to cancel, and later sent a polite note expressing her regret at missing it.)
The assessment of the Christie's expert inspired the owner to begin the laborious and hugely expensive process of authentication. He made his way to the Canadian Conservation Institute, a branch of the federal Department of Canadian Heritage, which does restoration and authentication for Canadian museums. "I was in awe of the place," he recalls of that first trip. "It was like 2001: A Space Odyssey,all the machines and such."
At that meeting, the institute staff told him of the process his painting would have to go through -- and of the costs involved. "I almost fainted," he recalls of being told the first cost estimate. They also kindly advised him that their work was generally done for institutions, not wide-eyed innocents who walked in off the street with a portrait under their arms. But they agreed, in the end, to take on the portrait -- he would pay for the tests as he could, and they would do the work in slow periods.
The CCI did as much as it could, X-raying the picture, photographing it under fluorescent light and analyzing the chemical compounds of its paint. At every step, they could have turned up evidence that the painting was a fake. But they didn't. There was no picture underneath it, no changes made at a later date. The date in the corner wasn't added later (researchers could tell because there was no layer of dust and varnish between it and the rest of the painting).
These tests put paid to the Spielmann analysis, which then stood between the portrait and possible authenticity. In an issue of Connoisseur magazine published in 1909, Spielmann -- a man who had seen dozens of purported Shakespeare pictures -- told of his analysis of the "Sanders Portrait," brought to him for examination by its then owner. He wrote, "I am far from suggesting Mr. Hale Sanders' portrait is a fake."
He noted that the face was painted in "a delicate manner characteristic of 17th-century portraiture" and said it was "pure, and a good example of the period." The face, eyes, mustache, eyebrows and "attachment of the ear" matched the Droeshout, he said.
But, but -- he concluded that its subject looked too young to be Shakespeare at 39, that the collar and dress were added later, that the paper label on the back was only 50-odd years old, that the paint was anachronistic.
However, Spielmann did his work by eye. Ninety years later, the analysis of the CCI disproved his criticisms: The paper is at least 300 years old, the paint is from the period and all the painting was done at the same time.
Eventually, the CCI told the owner that it had done all it could, and he needed to call in the big guns. A tiny fragment of the label on the back was sent to the IsoTrace Radiocarbon Library at the University of Toronto for radiocarbon dating, which revealed that it was 340 years old, plus or minus 50 years.
The bills mounted. A radiocarbon dating costs about $1,000, while the CCI conservationists' labour costs $110 per hour, and tests can take a team of researcher weeks. The owner used up his retirement savings, considered a bank loan, took part-time jobs.
There was one more big test. The owner paid to bring Dr. Peter Klein, an expert with a peerless international reputation, to see the painting at the CCI. Klein is an expert in dendrochronology, the science of dating using the characteristic annual growth rings of trees to assign dates to timber. His analysis concluded that the painting was on oak from a Baltic forest, could not have been painted before 1597 and, given the normal storage times for wood at the time, "a creation is plausible from 1603 upwards."
(None of this, of course, proves anything conclusively. What it does is rule out details that would make the portrait inauthentic.)
Next came the question of provenance. Curators and appraisers demand to know a painting's history, its pedigree -- who owned it and where they got it. The owner had his story, handed down through the Sanders clan, crediting the panting to one John Sanders, small-time actor. And he had the painting. But he needed the lineage. He had a family Bible with a family tree going back to 1790. The years before that he would have to fill in himself.
So he began making regular trips to the International Genealogical Index at the Ottawa Family History Centre, a public facility partly supported by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons, who believe that one's ancestors can be baptized and saved posthumously, are strong proponents of genealogical research). He began to fill in the holes in the family tree, moving the living-room furniture aside to lay out cards covered in dates of births and deaths and marriages. When he had more money, he hired a genealogist in Worcester to search church records. Today, the family tree is complete back to 1680.
However much science and genealogy can tell us, though, one mystery can probably not be solved with certainty: Who really is the subject of the portrait?
John Sanders existed. He is in the church records, christened at All Souls Church in Worcester, ancestral home of the Sanders clan, in March, 1575. In the family story, he dabbled in painting -- portraits and painting jobs in the theatre, although Elizabethan stages did not have backdrops as we know them -- and worked as a jobbing actor. According to the family and some academic sources, there is a John Sanders in the records of stage companies at the time, on the rolls of the Chamberlain's Men and the King's Men at the same time as Shakespeare.
There are some other clues, such as the spelling of Shakespeare's name on the label -- "Shakspere," which is how the playwright himself signed his name on his will and on another of the six surviving documents that bear his signature.
But nothing, of course, can prove Sanders painted this picture, that his mate Shakespeare sat for it, or that the painter was telling the truth when he (if it was him) put the label on the back.
After all, there is huge scholarly wrangling over who really wrote the "Shakespeare" plays, and many question that it was the mercantile fellow from Stratford-upon-Avon. Much of the debate around the other portraits of that Shakespeare has centred on whether he would have had his portrait painted at all. Some argue that because he was not a person of high social status or much of a presence at Court, he would not have had a portrait done, a luxury reserved for the wealthy.
Others -- Stanley Wells, a scholar who heads the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, for one -- point out that in 1603, Shakespeare would have been a wealthy man (from his wool- and grain-trading enterprises, if not from the theatre) and "there is no reason he shouldn't have had a portrait painted." A play entitled Return to Parnassus, an anonymous student work written in about 1599 and performed at St. John's College at Cambridge University, contains the line, "Oh Sweet Master Shakespeare, I'll have his picture in my study."
There is no written record of Shakespeare sitting for a portrait by Sanders or anybody else. But the owner believes this: That the painter, a contemporary of Shakespeare's, knew he was destined for great things. That he set out to create an heirloom, something that would be of emotional if not financial value, and so chose the best paints and wood (rather than painting on canvas) of his time. "There's no proof. Nobody knows. But there is not one negative thing to prove [this theory] wrong."
The owner intends to sell it soon, likely through a large U.S. auction house. That, of course, will be the end of its 400 years in the Sanders family. "My kids aren't interested," he says, a brief sadness twisting his face. He laughs, a little wryly: "They think I'm an ATM, so I'll just do what I'm supposed to do."
Before the painting can be sold in the United States, it must be considered by a board under the Cultural Property Export and Import Act, which governs the removal of any work of cultural significance to Canada from the country. Canadian institutions must be given the opportunity to bid on it -- although it is unlikely that a Canadian gallery could afford to buy the work at its probable reserve price. Similarly, the owner has not been able to take it to Britain for evaluation because British law gives the government the right to seize work of cultural significance there and bar its export.
Appraisers hesitate to put a value on it, for nothing comparable has ever been auctioned. Unofficially, the owner has been told anything from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions. He and his wife like the idea of the money, of course, though the higher estimates are impossible really to fathom.
They would help out their children's young families, naturally, and they have causes they would like to support -- the message of a charismatic church group to which they belong, for one. They would assist many of the people with disabilities they have met through their community work: a blind girl who needs a scholarship, another child who needs transport.
After these long years of research, though, the owner has another motivation. He believes there is a truth to be told. "I'm so darn sick of seeing that Droeshout picture everywhere I go!" he bursts out. "On buses and on billboards -- it's even on the door of the men's room of Chapters!" The world, he says, has been deprived of the true face of Shakespeare, the most revered man after Jesus, in his estimation, and he'd simply like to set the historical record straight.
"I hope it doesn't end up on somebody's wall," he says. "It should be in a museum where people can see it. It's time to reveal Shakespeare to the world."
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