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Creator:
George Gower, ca. 1538–1596
Title:

Portrait of Thomas Whythorne, Musician

Date:
1569
Medium:
Oil on board
Dimensions:
Overall: 16 5/8 × 14 5/16 inches (42.3 × 36.4 cm)
Credit Line:
Transfer from the James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Copyright Status:
Public Domain
Accession Number:
B2024.1
Classification:
Paintings
Collection:
Paintings and Sculpture
Subject Terms:
portrait
Associated People:
Whithorne, Thomas (ca. 1528–1596), composer and autobiographer
Access:
Not on view
Note: To make an appointment to see this work, please contact the Paintings and Sculpture department at ycba.paintings@yale.edu. Please visit the Paintings and Sculpture collections page on our website for more details.
Link:
https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:72958
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The musician and composer Thomas Whythorne (ca. 1528-1596) was typical of the new urbane and upwardly mobile professional class in Elizabethan England. Pious and vain in equal measure, Whythorne commissioned a remarkable number of portraits of himself over the course of his life, but this is the only one known to have survived.
Uniquely for the period, his diary records the experience of sitting for his portraits and his ruminations on how age and illness had changed his appearance. One entry in the diary, written twelve years since Whythorne had last sat for his portrait, gives a good sense of how sitting to an artist increased his self-knowledge: "I saw by my last counterfeit [portrait] that I was much changed from that I was at that time, as by the long and fullness of my beard, the wrinkles on my face, and the hollowness of my eyes."

Gallery label, 2016

Christie's Sale Catalogue : Important English Pictures : 19 November 1965, Christie's, November 19, 1965, p. 22-23, lot 41, Fiche B51 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Christie's sale catalogue : Catalogue of Portraits of Musical Celebrities and Pictures and Drawings the Property of Dr. W. H. Cummings, F.S.A. : 17 December 1915, Christie's, London, December 17, 1915, p. 24, lot 136, Fiche B51 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Tarnya Cooper, Citizen Portrait : Portrait Painting and the Urban Elite of Tudor and Jacobean England and Wales, Yale University Press, New Haven, p. 56-58, ND1314.2 .C662 2012 OVERSIZE (YCBA) [YCBA]

Loan Exhibition Depicting the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, 26th January - March 1933 in aid of the Young Women's Christian Association, Battley Brothers, London, p, 29, no. 177, N6765 L63 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Thomas Whythorne, Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne, Oxford University Press, London, Frontis, p. 115, ML410 W6414 A3 1962 (YCBA) [YCBA]


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