by Eric Roberts
Sixteenth and early-seventeenth century portraiture is notoriously fraught with difficulties of artist attribution and subject identification. A perfect example of how little we actually know about the silent stories that all old master paintings conceal is the Gorhambury Estate’s untitled portrait of an infant boy holding and apple.
The more one studies this picture the more mysterious it becomes. Traditionally thought by many to be a portrait of Francis Bacon at about eighteen months of age, it shows an alert, curious child attracted to something just outside the frame. The baby boy’s dark blue outer shirt has slashed sleeves – an indication of wealth and social status. More significantly, the left hand touches the heart, while the right hand holds an apple. This symbolic configuration of gestures stokes our suspicions that the subject of the picture is no run-of-the-mill aristocratic offspring. If, instead of an apple, the child was holding a crystal orb we might assume that this is a painting of a royal infant, or perhaps even a secular saviour, born to serve humankind. The Gorhambury portrait contains another symbolic component in the form of the pendant on a gold chain slung around the baby’s shoulders and resting between both hands. Without access to the original painting it is difficult to analyse the significance of the three figures one can just make out in the only image of the picture available online. A high resolution image is needed to examine this detail more closely.
Although preliminary and unresolved, perhaps for the first time this study of the Gorhambury baby portrait identifies five extant variants of the same portrait and ultimately argues in favour of the Gorhambury portrait as being the original prototype of the other versions. The present article is also a plea for further scientific examination of this group of Renaissance baby portraits in order to establish their dates of creation, countries of origin, and much more besides.
Read the full PDF:
Portrait-of-an-Infant-Holding-an-Apple-compressed.pdf
