News from the art world
Shakespeare the butcher
The critic John Dover Wilson once said that it resembled a “self-satisfied pork butcher”, says Dalya Alberge in The Guardian. But scholars have now concluded that the bust of William Shakespeare above his grave in the Holy Trinity church in Stratford-upon-Avon is actually the best likeness of the playwright that we have. The bust was long thought to have been a memorial created years after Shakespeare’s death in 1616, not an actual portrait. But according to new research, the work was, in fact, “modelled from life by a sculptor who knew him”. Professor Lena Cowen Orlin of Georgetown University argues that the evidence suggests it was created by a London sculptor named Nicholas Johnson, and that Shakespeare was alive at the time (the date of his death was inscribed later). By contrast, it is now thought that the most familiar image we have of Shakespeare – a work known as the Cobbe portrait – does not actually depict the Bard at all.
Banksy’s superhero nurse
The sale of a Banksy painting of a young boy playing with “a superhero nurse doll” has raised more than £16m for an NHS charity, says BBC News. Entitled Game Changer, the work first appeared in the foyer of Southampton General Hospital during the first wave of the pandemic, accompanied by a note from the graffiti artist: “Thanks for all you’re doing. I hope this brightens the place up a bit, even if it is only black and white.” The image depicts a young boy in dungarees casting aside his action figures to play with a nurse doll complete with Red Cross apron, nurse’s cape and protective mask. When the hospital put it up for auction at Christie’s last week, the work sold for £16.75m, the vast majority of which will go to Southampton Hospitals Charity. The sale marks a record for Banksy, whose previous auction high came when his piece Devolved Parliament, depicting “the House of Commons overrun with chimpanzees”, fetched £9.9m in 2019.