The Soest Portrait of Shakespeare

Summary

Students of Shakespeare portraiture will be interested to learn that a portrait of Shakespeare by Gerard Soest has recently been acquired by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust at Stratford-upon-Avon.

The picture was painted probably somewhere between 1660 and 1680 and was engraved early in the eighteenth century. It measures 29.5 by 24.5 inches, that is, just about life-size, and the subject is represented in a three-quarter view. The expression of the face is delicate, the beard and moustache slight and the hair curly and ample. The costume represents what the artist presumably thought Shakespeare would have been wearing in his lifetime and the collar at least suggests some possible relation to the Chandos portrait.

Quite apart from the early eighteenth-century engraving of Soest's picture of Shakespeare, stylistic evidence supports the attribution to Soest. Mr David Piper, Assistant Keeper of the National Portrait Gallery, who has had an opportunity to examine it, informs me that Soest hardly ever signed his pictures, but that he is one of the easiest painters of his time to recognize. Mr Piper believes that the portrait is either Soest's original or a replica of it by himself.