From an assignment for my Rare Books and Special Collections class this past semester comes this post: a few objects from the Digital Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford featuring two men and one woman whose identities remain a mystery in the annals of art history.
Portrait of an unidentified man, late 17th century (Link)
In Lancashire, England, during the mid-19th century, Lord Edward Smith-Stanley, the 14th Earl of Derby (“Lord Stanley”) found a small picture set in the front cover of a volume of letters he owned. This picture, barely larger than an index card, was a black-and-white portrait of a young man with a long curly hair, sporting a cravat around his neck and a ruffled coat. After a monogram bearing the letters “TF” was found inscribed on the back of the picture, it was determined that the artist was Thomas Forster (c. 1677-1712) (Bodleian 2019).
Thomas Forster was a portrait draughtsman, noted for his drawings of regular, non-famous people of his time (Coombs 2004). Working in the tradition of “ad vivum,” or “to life,” Forster was renowned for his lifelike portraits. Most of these portraits were intended for engraving as frontispieces to books, allowing owners to signify their ownership of the book with style (Cust 1889). One might assume then that the man in the picture at one time owned the volume of letters that Lord Stanley came to possess. But upon further analysis, researchers discovered that the volume of letters (a correspondence between the Earl of Clarendon and the Earl of Abingdon from 1683 to 1685) was bound in the 19th century (Bodleian 2019). Forster died in 1712, meaning that Lord Stanley’s book postdates the picture by nearly a hundred years.
Lord Stanley donated the picture to the Bodleian Library in 1854 and claimed that the man in the picture was James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth (1649-1685) (Bodleian 2019). Portraits of the Duke bear an uncanny resemblance to the man in the picture. However, arithmetic reveals that Thomas Forster would have been eight years old at the time of the Duke’s death in 1685. Also, most of the Forster’s works date between 1696 and 1712, making the Duke an unlikely candidate for the identity of the man in question, leaving historians still to wonder who the man in the picture might be (Coombs 2004).
Measuring 114 by 95 mm in the shape of an oval, the portrait is a plumbago drawing on vellum. Plumbago is now commonly referred to as graphite, meaning that Forster used a pencil to make it, a mode of illustration that became popular during 17th century (Encyclopædia Britannica. (n.d.)). Vellum is a type of thin parchment made from the skin of calves, which produces a high-quality and durable writing material (Encyclopædia Britannica. (n.d.)). Today, the picture can be found in the Weston Library of the Bodleian Libraries, and it was digitized as part of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Digitization Project and added to the Digital Bodleian in June of 2019 (Bodleian 2019).
Portrait of an unidentified woman, 17th century (Link)
In 1955, a group of art conservators at the Bodleian Library made a surprising discovery. A painting of the 16th-century philosopher and statesman Sir Thomas More had been retrieved and was being evaluated when conservators found another painting hiding underneath it: a portrait of a woman. The discovery was made using X-ray radiography, a technology that emerged in the early 20th century, which allows researchers to detect layers of paint beneath a surface (Vanpaemel 2010). Initially, this portrait was dated to the year 1750, but upon further analysis, historians found it was likely painted much earlier, sometime during the 1600s. The woman in the portrait has never been identified.
The portrait is an oil painting on a small wooden panel measuring 255 by 200 mm (approximately 10 by 8 inches). The woman in the portrait glances outward with her face turned slightly to her right, a collar pulled high against her neck, an elaborate wreath atop her red hair. Conservators also found a Latin phrase inscribed on the panel: “Moro supremus [Henri]cius regni Angliae 1527.” Translated loosely, it means, “More, supreme under [Henri]cus, Kingdom of England, 1527” (Bodleian 2019). This suggests that the outer portrait was meant to represent Thomas More during the reign of King Henry VIII, from 1509 to 1547. However, this inscription provides little insight into the original portrait of the unidentified woman.
The Bodleian Library acquired the painting in 1755 by bequest after the death of the English clergyman and antiquarian Richard Rawlinson (Bodleian 2019). Authorship remains a mystery.
Since its discovery in 1955, other “hidden portraits” have been found. For instance, in 2011, researchers at the MoMA discovered a painting beneath Belgian artist Rene Magritte’s Le Portrait (1935). X-ray radiography revealed that Magritte had divided an earlier painting of his, Le Pose Enchantee (1927), to reuse for Le Portrait (Van der Snickt et al. 2016). A few years later, conservators at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, analyzing Picasso’s The Blue Room (1901), discovered a portrait of a man wearing a bow tie hidden beneath it (Favero et al. 2017). And, this past February, researchers at the Cyprus Institute found an upside-down portrait of a man hidden beneath Italian Renaissance painter Titian’s Ecce Homo, 1570-75 (Gasanova et al. 2017). The men in these hidden portraits, like the 17th century lady in this portrait, have not been identified.
Portrait of an unidentified man, early 18th century (Link)
Thomas William (“T.W.”) Bourne (1862-1948) was an English music scholar who, over the course of his life, amassed a large collection of music-related materials. Most of these materials pertained to the Baroque-era German composer George Frideric Handel, T.W. Bourne’s personal favorite and primary interest (Armstrong 1992). When Bourne died in 1948, this collection was donated to the Bodleian Library, whereupon conservators and historians began sifting through the large number of items. One of the items they found was this portrait of a man presumed to be Messiah-composer, Handel himself.
T.W. Bourne had thought it was Handel too, painted by English painter William Hogarth (1697-1764), renowned for his realistic portraits and engravings (O’Connell 2003). Bourne had enlisted the help of music scholar Friedrich Chrysander, art scholar D.S. MacColl, and painter Sir Walter Westley Russell for their opinions on the portrait, who all agreed that it was Handel. But more than two decades later, in 1970, historians reevaluated the portrait and realized that the man in the portrait was likely not Handel, nor a work painted by William Hogarth (Bodleian 2019).
Two art historians at the National Portrait Gallery, John Kerslake and Robin Gibson, upon seeing the portrait, wrote letters to the Bodleian Library, arguing that the painting resembled more “the style of late Kneller” than that of Hogarth. Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646-1723) was one of the prominent Baroque portraitists of England during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. A student of Rembrandt, Kneller was known for his versatility. His work even caught the attention of King Charles II, who eventually hired him to be his own principal painter. Later, King Charles knighted Kneller and made him a baronet in 1715, a title he carried until his death eight years later (Encyclopædia Britannica. (n.d.)).
Kerslake and Gibson’s claim prompted further investigation, leading conservators to discover a watermark in the paper that suggests it was manufactured in 17th-century France. However, there is still disagreement on whether the man in the portrait is or is not Handel. Historians cite the man’s hair and clothing as characteristic of the late 17th or early 18th centuries, aligning with the period that Handel lived. And, contrary to Kerslake and Gibson, the Bodleian Library mentions that “a recent imaging study pointed to congruencies with authenticated portraits of Handel” (Bodleian 2019).
The portrait was created with oil on paper, mounted on a small canvas that measures 360 by 278 mm (14 by 11 inches). It was digitized as part of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Digitization Project and added to the Digital Bodleian in June of 2019 (Bodleian 2019), where it continues to inspire questions about the unidentified man in the picture.
References
Armstrong, T. (1992). T.W. Bourne (1862-1948) – a forgotten pioneer. The Handel Institute Newsletter, Vol 3, No. 1, Spring 1992. https://handelinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/31.pdf
Coombs, K. (2004, September 23). Forster, Thomas (b. 1676/7), portrait draughtsman. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 12 Apr. 2025, from https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-9917.
Cust, L.H. (1889). Forster, Thomas (fl.1695-1712). In Stephen, Leslie (Ed.), Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 20. London: Smith, Elder & Co. p. 21. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.43584/page/n29/mode/2up
Encyclopædia Britannica. (n.d.). History of publishing. Britannica Academic. Retrieved April 11, 2025, from https://academic-eb-com.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/levels/collegiate/article/history-of-publishing/109461#28607.toc
Encyclopædia Britannica. (n.d.). Pencil drawing. Britannica Academic. Retrieved April 11, 2025, from https://academic-eb-com.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/levels/collegiate/article/pencil-drawing/59045
Encyclopædia Britannica. (n.d.). Sir Godfrey Kneller, Baronet. Britannica Academic. Retrieved April 12, 2025, from https://academic-eb-com.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/levels/collegiate/article/Sir-Godfrey-Kneller-Baronet/45783
Favero, P., Mass, J., Delaney, J., Woll, A., Hull, A., Dooley, K., & Finnefrock, A. (2017). Reflectance imaging spectroscopy and synchrotron radiation X-ray fluorescence mapping used in a technical study of The Blue Room by Pablo Picasso. Heritage Science, 5(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-017-0126-5
Gasanova, S., Bakirtzis, N. & Hermon, S. (2017). Non-invasive sub-surface analysis of the male portrait underlying the Titian’s Studio Ecce Homo. Heritage Science Vol 5, 33. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-017-0145-2
O’Connell, S. (2003). Hogarth, William. Grove Art Online. Retrieved 14 Apr. 2025, from https://www-oxfordartonline-com.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000038499.
Portrait of an unidentified woman, 17th century. (2019). Oxford, Bodleian Library LP 23: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/39915ec1-5bbe-4533-a537-cb0a18338c23/
Portrait of an unidentified man, early 18th century. (2019). Oxford, Bodleian Library LP 826: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/9c948d2d-2770-49aa-bbce-c890044cb8f3/
Portrait of an unidentified man, late 17th century. (2019). Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Clarendon 128: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/ce68a5f7-d300-4223-ab86-def371ff95e4/
Van der Snickt G., Martins A., Delaney J., et al. (2016). Exploring a Hidden Painting Below the Surface of Rene Magritte’s Le Portrait. Applied Spectroscopy. Vol 70(1):57-67. doi:10.1177/0003702815617123
Vanpaemel, G. (2010, June 1). X-Rays and Old Masters. The Art of the Scientific Connoisseur. Endeavour 34, no. 2 p. 69–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2010.04.004.