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 (25Vs x 181/2in) 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.

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 Richard III (Fig. 2)  click here. 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 than his left by extending the gown and the jewelled collar on that side a little further upwards. 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 and that the mouth has been tampered with in order to make the lips look thinner. 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 14in., are seven or eight inches taller and three or four inches wider than those of surviving Netherlandish panel portraits of the 1480s.

3a

3b

Caption: King Richard III.
Fig. 3a. King Richard III. Portrait before restoration. Fig. 3b. King Richard III. Portrait after restoration
Reproduced by kind permission of the
Society of Antiquaries.

In her catalogue of the 1973 exhibition Dr Tudor-Craig showed convincingly that the Royal Collection portrait, in its 'doctored' state, served as the general prototype for all the later paintings of Richard. The inequality of the shoulders is particularly noticeable as a feature which was carried through into all the subsequent versions, including the National Portrait Gallery's picture. The only surviving painting of Richard which is separate from this unfortunate tradition is the Society of Antiquaries portrait (Figs 3a and b). The cleaning and conservation of this portrait which was undertaken during 2007 showed that it too had been subjected to some overpainting in which the appearance of Richard's mouth had been altered: the central horizontal line of the mouth had been moved to a slightly higher position, making the jaw look more tightly set and thus giving the face as a whole a more determined expression. (The photograph reproduced here, showing the portrait before and after cleaning, make the difference clear, as well as illustrating the newly-revealed brilliance of the painting's colours.) At whatever point in the painting's history this change was made, its purpose would seem to have been to make the king's likeness conform more closely to that in the other portraits of him. Through the many copies, and copies of the copies, which were derived from the Royal Collection portrait, the look of thin-lipped unscrupulousness clearly became accepted as a facial characteristic which was standard in Richard's portraiture. The fact that the Antiquaries portrait is different - and different also in showing only a slight unevenness in Richard's shoulders - serves to underline its unique importance. Moreover, the panel's small dimensions, 12½ x 8in., are fully consistent with what one would expect of a contemporary portrait. Only its arch-topped format betrays the fact that this painitng belongs to the early sixteenth century; the original is more likely to have been rectangular in shape.

In order to appreciate what these two early copies of portraits 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 recognizable. 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 recognized 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 (Fig. 4) 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. 5), 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.

Fig. 4 To view the Royal Collection portrait of Henry VI click here. Then click on 'View larger picture in new window'.

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 characterization 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 as they appear in the newly-cleaned Antiquaries portrait have an intense earnestness about them. This is particularly evident in the eyes while the mouth is stern, perhaps even severe; it is a face which accords well with the new view of Richard as a man who was resolved to put things to rights, both in the state and within his own family: loyaulte me lie. Whatever interpretation one puts on Richard's expression in this image, one must be aware - though always bearing in mind the caveat that the painting is a copy - that the expression itself resulted from a conscious decision on Richard's part. The artist of the original portrait 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. 5. To view the Royal Collection portrait of Edward IV click here. Then click on ‘View larger picture in new window’.

In considering the portrait image of Richard as a statement, one must take into account the fact that other elements in the image, besides the king's actual face, also had significance. The costume, and especially the jewellery , was clearly intended to signify his great wealth. In both paintings Richard wears an elaborately jewelled gold hat-brooch and a jewelled gold collar which would have cost a not-so-small fortune. Henry V had owned a collar similar to that in the Royal Collection painting of Richard, loaded with rubies, which was valued after his death at the truly enormous sum of £5,162 13s. 4d. and was in fact the single most valuable item which he had possessed. But there is more to the jewellery than this. Richard's hat-brooch in the Antiquaries portrait (Fig. 3) is in the form of a rose. With a ruby in a gold setting at its centre, and outer petals which are either black or transparent, it is not obviously meant to be the White Rose of York, though it seems fair to assume that any jewelled rose worn by a Yorkist king would have had this significance. Underlying the 'heraldic' meaning was a much more widely known association: in the Middle Ages the rose was, above all else, the flower of the Virgin Mary .Richard's hat-brooch therefore signifies both his loyalty to his family and his devotion to the Virgin. The hat-brooch in the Royal Collection painting (Fig. 2) also, interestingly, has a religious significance: it is in the form of a Greek cross. In the king's collar in this painting the jewels which are contained within lozenge-shaped settings may again have been intended to be roses, though since the 'petals' which surround each of the central stones are only four in number, one cannot be certain of this ( a conventional heraldic rose is a flower with five petals). However, the likelihood that they were meant to be roses is strengthened by the unmistakable fact that the motifs filling the inner angles of the lozenges are fleurs-de-Iys. The fleur-de-Iys, a stylized lily, was another flower which had a specially close association with the Virgin Mary. Lastly here, the gilt spandrels in the upper corners of the Royal Collection painting contain two small profile heads which have been shown to derive from Roman medallions representing the Emperor Constantine and his mother St Helena. Constantine was, of course, the emperor who had established Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, and St Helena was the reputed discoverer of the True Cross and the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. In emphasizing the strength and genuineness of Richard's documented enthusiasm for leading a crusade to the Holy Land, Michael K. Jones has recently referred not only to these profile heads, by means of which Richard's commitment to the crusading cause was made to form part of his portrait, but also to the fact that the principal relic owned by his mother, Cecily Neville, was a supposed fragment of the True Cross. To this it may be added that St Helena was believed to have been the daughter of a British king, and Constantine was in actual fact proclaimed emperor at York, a city with which Richard had particularly close ties going back as far as the early 1470s.

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 Neville. 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. 6) 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. (This portrait was also cleaned and conserved in 2007.) 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 6. King Edward IV Reproduced by kind permission of the Society of Antiquaries

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 scene 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 marked 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. 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

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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)
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Tudor-Craig, Pamela, Richard III, exhibition catalogue, National Portrait Gallery, London (London, 1973; 2nd edn, 1977)