The Portraiture of Richard III
by Frederick Hepburn
| Most people today, if asked to bring to mind a portrait of Richard III, would probably conjure up an image of the painting in the National Portrait Gallery (Fig. 1). During the past half-century or so this painting has gained a firm foothold in the popular imagination as the portrait of Richard. It appeared as the frontispiece, both of Paul Murray Kendall's biography of the king (1955) and - after cleaning had revealed its delicately-painted gold filigree spandrels - of the catalogue of the National Portrait Gallery's Richard III exhibition (1973). Since then it has been reproduced not only on the covers of further important books about Richard but also on innumerable posters, tea-towels and even T-shirts. It was also, of course, the face in this portrait which launched Inspector Grant on his inquiry into the fate of the Princes in the Tower in Josephine Tey's detective novel The Daughter of Time. |
 Richard III by Paul Murray Kendall |
The
face is no doubt a compelling one. Intelligent, troubled and with an
air of nursing some unseen hurt, it appeals to the romantic in all of
us. But it needs to be set aside. The fact is that this portrait of
Richard was painted over a century after his death: examination of the
tree-rings of the oak panel on which it is painted enabled the dendrochronologist
John Fletcher to date the picture to the years around 1590-1600. Moreover,
the size of the portrait (25½ x 18½ in) and the style in which it is
painted are typical of the many pictures of kings and queens which were
produced to decorate the long galleries of great houses in the late
Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Such series of portraits sometimes
stretched back as far as William the Conqueror (though the images of
the Norman and earlier Plantagenet kings were inevitably fictitious),
and their purpose was chiefly to provide colourful wall-decoration.
Pamela Tudor-Craig assembled a considerable number of paintings of Richard
III of this date, all of them variations of the same basic type, for
the 1973 exhibition, and many of these are illustrated in the catalogue
together with the National Portrait Gallery's picture.
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There are two paintings of Richard which stand out from the crowd. Although neither was produced during his lifetime, they are both markedly earlier in date than the rest: John Fletcher's calculations ( slightly modified by more recent research in dendrochronology) place them in the second decade of the sixteenth century, during the early years of Henry VIII. One of these portraits is in the Royal Collection (Fig. 2), and is almost certainly identical with a portrait of Richard which was recorded there in an inventory of 1542, and the other belongs to the Society of Antiquaries of London (Fig. 3); it was bequeathed to the Society in 1828, and there is evidence that it came originally from the Paston family's collection of pictures at Oxnead, Norfolk. |
To
view the Royal Collection portrait of Then click on ‘View larger picture in new window’. |
| In the case of both of these portraits it has been shown that the authentic detail of the costume, and particularly of the jewellery, suggests very strongly that they were copied from lost originals painted during the sitter's lifetime. With the Royal Collection portrait the matter is not quite straightforward because it appears that, at some time after the copy was first painted, some deliberate alterations were made to it. The king's right shoulder was made to look higher by extending the gown and the jewelled collar on that side a little further upwards. Thus was created the unevenness about the shoulders which, as Pamela Tudor-Craig has noted, was subsequently carried through into all the later versions of this type, including the National Portrait Gallery's picture. With the passing of time the additional paintwork on the gown has become fainter, so that the original line of the shoulder is now quite clearly visible to the naked eye. An X-radiograph of the painting showed up this change very clearly, and also revealed that Richard's right eye was originally not as narrow as it now appears: the lower edge of the eye has been slightly raised and straightened. Also, judging from the paintwork itself, there is reason to think that the outline of the nose may have been enlarged a little. Without doubt these alterations were made with the intention of 'improving' the portrait by bringing it more into line with the early Tudor view of Richard as a deformed villain. If, as seems likely, the copyist himself made the changes to his work, it is very doubtful whether such a lowly artisan would have dared to take the initiative in doing so; probably they were suggested, or dictated, by someone in a position of authority at the court. |
|
In other respects the Royal Collection portrait can be regarded as a
faithful enough copy of an original painting which was contemporary
with Richard, except that it was probably somewhat enlarged: its dimensions,
22¼ x 14 in, are seven or eight inches taller and three
or four inches wider than those of surviving Netherlandish panel portraits
of the 1480s. The
Society of Antiquaries portrait (Fig. 3), on the other hand, measures
only 12½ x 8 in, and the size of the figure of Richard is fully consistent
with what one would expect to find in a contemporary portrait. Only
the arch-topped format of the painting betrays the fact that it belongs
to the early sixteenth century; the original is more likely to have
been rectangular in shape. The Antiquaries portrait is, moreover, a
work of high quality, and the king's face has not been subjected to
any overpainting.
In
order to appreciate what these two images of Richard can tell us, we
need to see them in their art-historical context. In the 1480s the painting
of likenesses of individual people was still a relatively new phenomenon
in Western Europe. The concept of portraiture had no real place in medieval
thought; it belonged rather to the Renaissance, that 'rebirth' of the
world of classical Greek and Roman antiquity which put Man at the centre
of things and attached paramount importance to the characters and achievements
of human beings. As part of this development the painting of lifelike
representations of faces had come from Italy to France during the fourteenth
century. A panel portrait of King John II of France (Louvre, Paris)
with a very Italian-looking gold background dates probably from the
1350s, and evidence derived from later copies indicates that several
of the French royal dukes had portraits of themselves painted in the
early years of the fifteenth century. When, from the 1420s onwards,
the scene of major artistic innovation in the north shifted away from
Paris to the towns of the Burgundian Netherlands, the invention of oil-painting
enabled the art of portraiture to be carried to new heights: much more
realistic effects could now be achieved in terms of depicting different
textures and making forms look properly three-dimensional by 'modelling'
them in light and shade. And, due to the great commercial prosperity
of Bruges, Ghent and Brussels, the leading masters of the time - Jan
van Eyck, Petrus Christus, Rogier van der Weyden, Dieric Bouts, Hugo
van der Goes and Hans Memling - found themselves painting the portraits
of merchants and bankers and their families as well as of the dukes
and other members of the ruling class.
But
portraits of the more important rulers were always in a category of
their own. They were a part - albeit a relatively minor one - of the
'magnificence' which a ruler needed to deploy in order to maintain his
position successfully. Not for nothing had the king of France and the
royal dukes (including the first two Valois dukes of Burgundy, Philip
the Bold and John the Fearless) had themselves painted in profile. This
was how the ancient Roman emperors had been shown on their coins, so
a profile image had connotations of imperial power and grandeur. A profile
head also had another advantage: it enabled the artist to emphasize
the distinctive features of each ruler's face - the members of the Valois
family presented in particular a series of very individual noses - and
thus to create a silhouette which was instantly recognisable. Once established,
such an image could be repeated in various media (panel portraits, miniatures
in illuminated manuscripts, even in cameo on jewellery) in the knowledge
that it would be recognised without the need for any identifying label.
In this sense a portrait image was akin to the badges which, interestingly,
started to be used extensively by these same French rulers at this same
time: like the various distinguishing animal and plant badges, each
characteristic portrait functioned as a kind of emblem, not altogether
different from heraldry, but more personal. It is worth noting in this
regard that Philip the Bold (ruled 1364-1404) and his son John the Fearless
(ruled 1404-19) each used only two different portrait images during
their lives; and although their successor, Philip the Good (ruled 1419-67)
used three, two of these were extremely similar, being essentially the
same image with and without a hat. All three portrait images of Philip
the Good showed his face in three-quarters view, and all three were
marked, again, by a strong, almost caricature-Iike emphasis on the individuality
of his features.
| To
turn now to the rulers of England, the evidence suggests that their
use of portraits was very much influenced by the practice of their
French/Netherlandish counterparts, though not so extensive. It comes
as no surprise to find that, sometime around 1415-20, Henry V had
his portrait painted in profile (known through many later copies).
With Henry VI we come to a three-quarter-face image which, judging
from the earliest surviving version, a painting in the Royal Collection
which was produced at the same time as the Richard III, owes
its compositional idea to portraits painted by Rogier van der Weyden
in the 1450s. The Henry VI is eloquently expressive of the
king's kindly good nature, but at the same time, in its realism,
it cannot avoid betraying something of his feeble-mindedness. The
best version of Edward IV's portrait image is again a painting in
the Royal Collection (Fig. 4), even though the evidence from the
panel's tree-rings places it rather later than the other copies
in this group: it evidently dates from the 1530s. The reliability
of the face in this painting as a copy of its lost original has
been quite startlingly demonstrated by comparison with a unique
print of an engraving which was based on the same image; the print
actually dates from the early 1470s. The portrait of Edward emphasizes
his big, broad physique, and also gives an unmistakable impression
of the easygoing affability for which he was known. |
| When we come to the early copies of portraits of Richard III (Figs 2 and 3), it is clear that we are again dealing with a single image: although the costume is different, the two paintings are essentially mirror-images of one another. This practice, made easy by a simple reversal of the ad vivum drawing which would have served as the basic 'pattern' for both of the original paintings, gave greater flexibility to the image in terms of its use and is well attested in the portraiture of other late-fifteenth-century rulers, notably that of the heir of the Burgundian dukes, Philip the Fair ( ruled 1494-1506); the costume was often varied from painting to painting, and this would later reach epic proportions in the portraiture of Elizabeth I. Richard's portrait image is in some ways very similar to that of Edward IV: they share the same general composition and essentially the same type of costume and the same pose, in which the gesture of the hands draws our attention to a ring. Despite all this, however, the characterisation of the two brothers is entirely different: if Edward's relaxed air of bonhomie seems an apt enough reflection of his motto, counfort et lyesse ('comfort and joy'), Richard's features express a tough, strong-willed determination. In particular, the clenched jaw and tightly-drawn lips accord well with the view of Richard as a man who was resolved to put things to rights, both in the state and within his own family, and would let nothing stand in his path: loyaulté me lie. Whatever interpretation one puts on Richard's expression in this image, one can be sure that the expression itself resulted from a conscious decision on Richard's part. The original artist would have worked in consultation with the king (this was equally true of all these rulers, of course ), so that the end-product was a 'statement' which reflected the ruler's wishes. . |
Fig.
4. To view the Royal Collection portrait of Then click on ‘View larger picture in new window’. |
| A second aspect which needs to be taken into account is that the portrait image may not have constituted a complete statement on its own: it may have been part of a greater whole. Edward IV's portrait had a companion image of his consort, Elizabeth Woodville (once again known only through later copies). This naturally makes sense of the fact that Edward was shown holding a ring, and it also raises the possibility - indeed the likelihood - that the portrait of Richard which is reflected by the Royal Collection painting once had a pendant portrait of Anne Nevill. In this scheme the king would have appeared on the viewer's left and the queen on the right. The viewer's left is the heraldic right, so precedence would have been given to the king. In the portrait reflected by the Antiquaries painting Richard faces in the opposite direction, a change which is likely to have been effected so that he could be made to yield precedence to a portrait of his elder brother. The Society of Antiquaries also possesses a painting of Edward (Fig. 5) which is virtually identical in size to the Richard III and, according to tree-ring evidence, was painted at the same time on a panel cut from the same tree. Although the two paintings have not always been together (there is some evidence to suggest that the Edward IV belonged to the Knyvett family at Old Buckenham, Norfolk), it seems reasonable to suppose that they were produced in the same workshop as copies of companion portraits which were painted originally during Richard's reign. If this is right, the purpose of the original portraits, in which the two kings faced towards each other wearing very similar clothing, would have been to give visual expression to the idea of the continuity of rule between the brothers. |
Fig 5.
King Edward IV |
The
ring which Richard is putting on his finger might therefore be interpreted
here as the coronation ring, the 'wedding ring of England'. The same
desire to express continuity may well explain the close similarity in
format and pose between the Royal Collection paintings of Edward and
Richard - and the Richard III is also similar enough to the Royal
Collection Henry VI to suggest that Richard may have wished to
align himself with this king as well. The arrangement of images of kings
in a series is something which would have happened very naturally in
the late fifteenth century: there were impressive exemplars in sculpture
(in Westminster Hall, for example, and on the choir screens at Canterbury
and York) and stained glass (in the library of All Souls College, Oxford,
and in St Mary's Hall, Coventry), to say nothing of numerous series
of drawings in various manuscript genealogies. And with regard to Henry
VI one remembers Richard's translation, in 1484, of Henry's remains
from Chertsey Abbey to St George's Chapel, Windsor. Since Edward IV's
body was already buried in the Chapel, Richard's purpose here would
seem to have been to establish some sense of reconciliation between
the House of York and the last Lancastrian king. In view of this evidence,
and given that, as far as we can tell, fifteenth-century rulers were
in no hurry to have their portraits painted until some specific need
arose, Richard's moment of need would seem to have come at the time
of his accession to the throne: because his claim was surrounded by
so much doubt, it may have been helpful to him to create a display of
portraits which affirmed his position as the next king in the series.
If
one asks for whose benefit, as a viewing 'audience', such a display
was made, it is unfortunate that lack of evidence prevents any reply
from being at all certain. The earliest royal inventory in which pictures
are listed dates from much later than Richard's reign -1542 - by which
time the medieval Palace of Westminster had been partially destroyed
by fire and abandoned as a royal residence; it was replaced as the king's
principal seat by Whitehall Palace, a very different set of buildings.
All that can usefully be pointed out is that, in both of the Henry VIII
inventories (1542 and 1547), portraits and other pictures are recorded
among the items located within the 'secret lodging' -the king's private
area of the palace. If one can hypothesize that this may have been a
continuation of earlier practice, then the portraits in Richard's palace
would have formed part of the mise en scène of that part of the
royal house to which only the most carefully-chosen guests were invited
to see the king or queen 'at home'. This is not to say, however, that
the portraits could not have been moved into the more public parts of
the palace on particular occasions.
Finally,
the question is still often asked about Richard's physical deformity.
It is, of course, inherently unlikely that the Tudor myth of Richard
III as a hunchback with a withered arm had no factual basis whatever:
there must have been a kernel of truth, however small, at its centre.
Writing at the very beginning of the Tudor period, sometime between
1485 and 1491, the Warwickshire antiquary John Rous described Richard
as follows:
He
was small of stature, with a short face and unequal shoulders, the right
higher and the left lower.
At
this early date, so soon after Richard's death, Rous could scarcely
have hoped to get away with concocting a false description: this would
quickly have been discredited by the large number of people still living
who had seen Richard for themselves. It has to be accepted, therefore,
that there really was some kind of noticeable unevenness about his shoulders.
As one would expect, this is not shown in any of the drawings of Richard
which appear in contemporary manuscripts such as the Salisbury Roll,
the Rous Rolls and the Beauchamp Pageant. These small figures were not
conceived as portrait likenesses: they are no more than conventional
representations of a generalized kingly type (though it is just possible
that the half-length figure in the genealogy at the end of the Beauchamp
Pageant contains an element of portraiture). Nor, to judge from the
evidence of the earliest copies, was any unevenness in Richard's shoulders
depicted in his painted portrait image. No doubt the inequality, especially
if it were only slight, was glossed over by the king's painter. In the
Antiquaries copy there may, nevertheless, be a hint of round-shoulderedness
in the way that both of the shoulders seem to be rather drawn up, with
the head jutting forward. Possibly further light will be thrown on this
in due course when the painting is cleaned. Meanwhile, although the
face in the Antiquaries copy may not appeal to many people's romantic
nature, it is this painting which brings us as near as we can now get
to knowing the truth about how Richard wished to be portrayed.
Bibliography
Drewett,
Richard, and Redhead, Mark, The Trial of Richard III (Gloucester,
1984)
Hepbum,
Frederick, Portraits of the Later Plantagenets (Woodbridge, 1986)
Jones,
Michael K, Bosworth 1485. Psychology of a Battle (Stroud,
2002)
Jugie,
Sophie, 'Les Portraits des Ducs de Bourgogne', Publication du Centre
européen d'études bourguignonnes (XIVe -XVe
siècles), N° 37 (Neuchâtel, 1997), " pp. 49-86
Martindale,
Andrew, Heroes,
ancestors..
relatives and the birth of the portrait, The Fourth Gerson Lecture,
University of Groningen, held on May 26, 1988 (Maarssen and The Hague,
1988)
Meiss,
Millard, French Painting in the time of Jean de Berry: the
late Fourteenth Century and the Patronage of the Duke, 2
vols (New York and London, 1967)
Starkey,
David (ed.), The Inventory of King Henry VIII, vol I: The
Transcript (London, 1998)
Taburet-Delahaye,
Elisabeth et al., Paris 1400. Les arts sous Charles VI, exhibition
catalogue, Musée du Louvre (Paris, 2004)
Thurley,
Simon, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England. Architecture and Court
Life 1460-1547 (New
Haven and London,
1993)
Tudor-Craig,
Pamela, Richard III, exhibition catalogue, National Portrait
Gallery, London (London, 1973; 2nd edn, 1977)