by Claire George
A Jacobean playwright is waiting to get together with old friends in Trafalgar Square, but he needs your help to settle in. The Sussex-born John Fletcher was one of the most successful dramatists of the early 17th century. A collaborator with Shakespeare, most famously on Henry VIII, he succeeded the Bard as house playwright for the King’s Men.
Fletcher also had a long-running writing partnership with Francis Beaumont, with whom, on one account, he lived in scandalously close quarters on Bankside, with “one wench in the house between them”.
Now the National Portrait Gallery has a chance to buy the only surviving picture of Fletcher to have been painted from life, a work that was featured in last year’s Searching for Shakespeare exhibition. By an unknown English artist, its history is well-attested, it having been in the Clarendon collection, assembled by Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, in the mid-17th century and held initially on his great mansion in Piccadilly.
The National Portrait Gallery has collected a significant proportion of the £218,000 purchase but needs to raise a further £50,000 from public donations by January 20.
The gallery already owns portraits of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and John Donne and the curator of 17th-century portraits, Catharine MacLeod, said “this portrait would enable us to fill an important gap in the story that we are currently able to tell about literature in this period. Literary portraits of this date are incredibly rare and the opportunity to acquire this fine painting is not to be missed.”
Visitors to the National Portrait Gallery will be able to see Fletcher’s picture when it goes on display in the Jacobean Galleries (room 4) from November 20.
More on the appeal.
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