The very fact that such a significant number of images of John Donne exist bears witness to his interest in the process of portraiture. Although in most cases we can only surmise the extent to which he may have contributed to the process of creating these images, we are given one particularly gripping account of his involvement in his final portrait. In the 1675 edition of his
Life of Donne, Isaak Walton recounts Donne’s design of his own deathbed portrait. Donne, Walton tells us, dressed himself in a winding-sheet tied at the head and feet and stood on a carved urn so that a “choice Painter” could “draw his picture”. The picture was eventually turned into the carved effigy by Nicholas Stone that still stands in St Paul’s Cathedral, but before that the picture was set by Donne’s bedside, where, Walton relates, it “became his hourly object until his death”.
1 Izaak Walton, The Lives of Dr John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr Richard Hooker, Mr George Herbert (London: Richard Marriot, 1675), pp. 71–72. Richard Wendorf comments that with this story “Walton shows us a figure who, in the moment of death, has literally turned himself into a work of art, a visual representation of that temporal moment that most interests any biographer: the point at which man and art absolutely merge”.
2 Richard Wendorf, “Visible Rhetorick: Isaak Walton and Iconic Biography”, Modern Philology 82.3 (1985): 269–291 (p. 283). Wendorf’s comment not only astutely identifies the method of the biographer and indeed of many biographical critics; it also implies the biographical tendency to seek truth in visual representations, particularly portraits. At the same time, it shows that Donne had already pre-empted his biographer, and not content with having “preach’t his own Funeral Sermon”,
3 Walton, Lives, p. 68. he had also, if not painted, then actively staged his own deathbed image. Walton’s account describes Donne taking on multiple roles with regard to the creation of this image. He directs the process of creation, is the subject of the painting, and finally is the spectator as he meditates on his own image. At the same time Walton’s version of both the creation and the reception of the deathbed image demonstrates to what extent this image, like any image, remains open to interpretation.
In the biography Walton goes on to juxtapose the image of Donne in his winding sheet with other pictures he has seen, focusing on one in particular:
I have seen one picture of him, drawn by a curious hand at his age of eighteen; with his sword and what other adornments might then suit with the present fashions of youth, and, the giddy gayeties of that age; and his Motto then was,
How much shall I be changed,
Before I am chang’d.
And, if that young, and his now dying Picture, were at this time set together, every beholder might say,
Lord! How much is Dr. Donne
already chang’d, before he is chang’d? And, the view of them, might give my Reader occasion, to ask himself with some amazement,
Lord! how much may I also, that am now in health be chang’d, before I am chang’d?
before this vile, this changeable body shall put off mortality? and, therefore to prepare for it.
4 Walton, Lives, pp. 73–74. Walton is referring here to the engraving by William Marshall that is used as a frontispiece to the 1635 Poems. This earlier portrait is not reproduced in the Life: the frontispiece of the whole volume (which also includes lives of Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker and George Herbert) shows the portrait of Donne painted in 1622 when he was forty-nine and already Dean of St Paul’s. The Marshall engraving of the portrait of Donne at the age of eighteen, dated 1591, with motto, sword, “and other adornments” (fig. 2), is accompanied in the 1635 volume by an elegiac poem written by Walton, which again compares the youthful Donne with the sober, older Dean of St Paul’s.
This was for youth, Strength, Mirth, and wit that Time
Most count their golden Age; but t’was not thine.
Thine was thy later yeares, so much refind
From youths Drosse, Mirth, & wit; as thy pure mind
Thought (like the Angels) nothing but the Praise
Of thy Creator, in those last, best Dayes.
Witnes this Booke, (thy Embleme) which begins
With Love; but endes, with Sighes, & Tears for Sins.
5 Poems, by J D., with Elegies on the Authors Death (London: M. Flesher for J. Marriot, 1635).It is assumed that Marshall’s engraving is based on a painted portrait that is now lost. As mentioned in the Introduction, twentieth-century speculation – involving very little evidence – that it might have been based on an original by Nicholas Hilliard, tried to establish a definite connection between Donne and the leading miniaturist of his day.
6 See Introduction, p. 8, n. 32. But even without this somewhat tenuous connection to Hilliard, Donne’s relationships with important English painters are certainly documented in later years. The miniature of him by Hilliard’s former pupil Isaac Oliver, dated 1616, in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, and of course Nicholas Stone’s effigy of Donne in his shroud (1631) – Donne had also commissioned Stone to make a funeral effigy of his wife
7 Hurley, John Donne’s Poetry, p. 35. – show that Donne associated with the best-known English visual artists of his time. The attraction of the Marshall/Hilliard theory is that it also allows us to locate this knowledgeable, culturally aware Donne at the beginning of his career, and as Dennis Flynn argues in the opening pages of
John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility, if the original of the Marshall engraving was indeed by Hilliard, it would give us important information about Donne’s standing at court in his youth.
8 Dennis Flynn, John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 1–5.The absence of a painted original, however, means that our knowledge and understanding of this early portrait is particularly mediated by text. Our appreciation of the monochrome print is enhanced by Walton’s textual ekphrasis in his Life, and by his elegy accompanying it in the 1635 Poems, and of course its use as a frontispiece juxtaposes it directly with Donne’s own texts.
Walton’s description draws attention to yet another textual feature of the portrait, the motto in Spanish in its top right-hand corner, which reads “Antes muerto que mudado”. Both the motto and Walton’s reference to it have provoked much discussion. Walton mistranslates it as “How much shall I be changed / Before I am changed”, which fits his conversion narrative that casts Donne as “a second St Austin”, as well as his moralising appropriation of the image.
9 Walton, p. 38. On Walton’s mistranslation, see Catherine J. Cresswell, “Giving a Face to an Author: Reading Donne’s Portraits and the 1635 Edition”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 37:1 (1995): 1–15 (p. 1) and Flynn, John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility, p. 2; p. 196 n. 2. The correct translation would be something like “Sooner dead than changed”. Edward Terrill has identified the source of the phrase, in Jorge de Montemayor’s pastoral romance
La Diana (1559).
10 T. Edward Terrill, “A Note on John Donne’s Early Reading”, Modern Language Notes 43 (1928): 318–319 (p. 318), cited by Flynn, John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility, p. 196 n. 2. The Spanish poem was known at the English court, translated into English in 1598 by Bartholomew Yong. It was also translated by Philip Sidney and was evidently an influence on his
Arcadia.
11 Walter R. Davis and Richard Lanham, Sidney’s Arcadia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press., 1965), p. 46. As Catherine Cresswell discusses in detail, once we know the source of Donne’s Spanish motto, its irony becomes apparent. In Montemayor’s poem, the line is not to be taken literally: it is “a fickle woman’s vow of constancy”, written on the sand by the faithless Diana, and remembered some time later by her lover Sireno, by then aware of Diana’s infidelity.
12 Cresswell, “Giving a Face”, pp. 7–9.While on the surface this Spanish motto could convey “unwaveringly stoic asseveration”, as Flynn puts it,
13 Flynn, John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility, p. 2. once it is read in tandem with its intertextual source it appears to comment ironically on constancy and mutability. No longer a comment on the inconstancy of women, the motto seems to ask to what extent the portrait can be a faithful representation. As Cresswell has pointed out, the portrait functions as an emblem, but an emblem-portrait in which “Donne’s motto and figure counter one another”. As she goes on to propose, “rather than reveal Donne, the emblem-portrait foregrounds not the portrayed subject but the very procedures of portraiture, its own and its subject’s constructed, fictive nature”.
14 Cresswell, “Giving a Face”, p. 10; p. 11. The motto’s ironic comment on inconstancy counters any attempt to “fix” a meaning on the portrait and opens it up to a much more complex interpretation.
This combination of image and contradictory words occurs in other portraits we have of Donne. Most notable is one of the best-known: the “Lothian portrait”, dated c. 1595, described in Donne’s will as “that picture of mine which is taken in Shaddowes”,
15 Bald, Donne, p. 567. also contains an inscription, in gold lettering at the top of the image, following the curve of the oval that surrounds Donne’s figure (fig. 1). The inscription references the painting’s “shadows” while reinforcing the image of Donne as melancholy lover: “Illumina tenebr[as] nostras Domina” (Lighten our darkness O Lady). Like the motto of the Marshall engraving, it is in a foreign language, like the typical motto of an impresa or emblem, and this too is an altered quotation, altered again in terms that change the gender of the source text. The source has been identified both as an Evensong collect from the Book of Common Prayer: “Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord” and as Psalm 17: 29 in the Vulgate: “Deus meus illumine tenebras meas” (My God illumines my darkness).
16 For an identification of the source as the Book of Common Prayer, originating in the Sarum Breviary, see Louis L. Martz, “English Religious Poetry”, in From Renaissance to Baroque: Essays on Literature and Art (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1991), p. 8; The National Portrait Gallery identifies the source as the Vulgate. National Portrait Gallery – Conservation Research – NPG 6790; John Donne http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitConservation/mw111844/John-Donne The Lothian portrait has been mediated through text in yet another way. Unlike the Marshall engraving of Donne in 1591, it was only known to exist because of fragmentary verbal clues, until it was rediscovered in the collection of the Marquess of Lothian at Newbattle Abbey by John Bryson in 1959.
17 John Bryson. “Lost Portrait of Donne”. The Times. (London) October 13, 1959: p. 13; p. 15. Apart from the “picture taken in Shaddowes” reference in Donne’s will, which bequeathed it to Robert Carr, Earl of Ancrum, two other verbal traces of the portrait seemed to corroborate its existence. William Drummond of Hawthornden refers to the bequest: “J. Done gave my L. Ancrum his picture in a melancholie posture with this word about it
De Tristitia ista libera me Domina” (From this sadness deliver me O Lady).
18 National Library of Scotland, MS 2060, f.44v, quoted in Bryson. Another reference is to be found in R. B. [Richard Baddily]’s
Life of Dr Thomas Morton:
For my selfe have long since seen his (Donne’s) Picture in a dear friends Chamber of his in
Lincolnes Inne, all envelloped with a darkish shadow, his face & feature hardly discernable, with this ejaculation and wish written thereon;
Domine [sic]
illumina tenebras meas, which long after was really accomplished.
19 R. B. The life of Dr. Thomas Morton, late Bishop of Duresme, 1669, pp. 101–102.While both Drummond and R. B. misremember the inscription, it is worth noting that they both emphasise its part in the portrait. Although R. B. failed to notice, or to recall, the playful misattribution of gender (and therefore inscribes the portrait in a narrative of conversion to spirituality that is similar to Walton’s), Drummond, while getting more of the words wrong, does remember the play on gender. Bryson, and most subsequent critics, concur with Drummond’s reading that Donne is assuming the posture of a melancholy lover. The floppy hat and the crossed hands correspond to the description of the “Inamorato” in Robert Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).
20 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford: John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, 1621), pp. 250–251. See Kate Gartner Frost, “The Lothian Portrait: A Prologemenon”, John Donne Journal 15 (1996): 95–125 (pp. 96–97). The combination of the consciously assumed posture and the inscription leads Kate Frost to describe this portrait, too, as an “impresa” to be interpreted.
21 Frost, “The Lothian Portrait: A Prologemenon”, pp. 98–99.Tarnya Cooper, formerly curator of the Tudor and Jacobean galleries at the National Portrait Gallery, describes the Lothian portrait as “extraordinary” and “an exception”,
22 Cooper, Citizen Portrait, p. 175. and the Portrait Gallery’s commentary on the painting notes that:
Given the nature of the pose and format, the portrait must have been carefully orchestrated by Donne; the inscription suggests that it may originally have been painted for a lover or for a friend. It is possible that the painter was a friend or associate – perhaps a painter working on theatrical events at the Inns of Court – who took instruction directly from the young poet about the nature of the composition.
23 National Portrait Gallery – Conservation Research – NPG 6790; John Donne. This involves a lot of speculation, of course, but it corresponds to Walton’s account of Donne’s involvement in the composition of his own deathbed image, and provides one more suggestion that Donne may have been involved in the production of an actual work of art as more than simply a sitter, inviting us to interpret the composition of the painting – and its intertextual inscription – as resulting from Donne’s initiative.
Donne’s apparent involvement in the composition of both the Lothian portrait and the Marshall image has obvious parallels with his orchestration of his deathbed image as described by Walton. Indeed, all the different pieces of information we have connecting Donne with visual art place him in multiple positions in relation to the material object. Often, as with the deathbed image, he assumes several positions simultaneously. He is the subject of the painting but also its orchestrator, and its spectator. He is a collector, a connoisseur and, as his will shows, a donator of paintings. Frost has suggested that, taken as a whole, the extant portraits of Donne could be seen as representing “a progress through his life, a kind of self-conscious ages of man scheme”.
24 Kate Gartner Frost, “The Lothian Portrait: A New Description”, John Donne Journal 13 (1994): 1–11 (p. 2). Even if this claim cannot be sustained, the similarities between the two earliest portraits of Donne in 1591 and 1595 do suggest, if not a “deliberate program”, certainly a continuing concern with issues of self-representation. Despite their differences, these two early portraits resemble each other in what David Piper has described as their “role-playing”,
25 Piper, Image of the Poet, p. 28. as well as in their punning intertextual inscriptions, which problematise our understanding of the paintings and remove the possibility of a simple identification of the face in the portrait as a true representation of Donne. Indeed, Cresswell holds that Donne’s portraits “resist a coherent reading”. She makes the point with reference to the Marshall engraving but goes on to argue that readers of all of Donne’s portraits “will not uncover the true Donne… but a rhetorical figure”.
26 Cresswell, “Giving a Face”, p. 4; p. 12. Rather like his poems, they both invite and resist interpretation, their layers of meaning adding to the impression of an elaborate artifice, challenging any expectation that a portrait will “deliver” the mind of the sitter.