Portrait of Thomas Whythorne, Musician
George Gower
1569
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."
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven · Image: Yale Center for British Art, Public domain · Text: Yale Center for British Art, CC0