Visitors to the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2001 take a look at a portrait of William Shakespeare handed down through the Sanders family.Deborah Baic/The Globe and Mail
For more than 400 years, the Sanders family and their Canadian descendants passed down, from generation to generation, a small painting that might be the only portrait of William Shakespeare created in his lifetime.
After centuries of being stashed in cupboards and shoved under beds (and occasionally even hanging on a living room wall), the painting passed to a retired Bell engineer named Lloyd Sullivan, who embarked on a three-decade-long quest to prove its authenticity and find a permanent home here in Canada that would create a lasting legacy for the Sanders name. To do so, he and his family worked with dozens of scientists and genealogists around the globe, who have largely backed up their claims about the panel’s age and origins. Major galleries have expressed interest and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is eager to hang the painting as soon as it can.
But one thing stands in the way: money. Mr. Sullivan’s quest has left the middle-class family millions of dollars in debt and they have yet to find a patron willing to bear the cost of keeping the portrait in Canada. And after suffering a series of tragedies in the past year, the family says that one of the most controversial portraits of one of the English language’s most important writers – now locked in a vault somewhere in the Toronto area – may soon have to leave the country.
The Sanders portrait, as shown in its original frame.Patti Gower/The Globe and Mail/The Globe and Mail
Not much is known about John Sanders, the man who supposedly painted the Sanders portrait. He could have been a bit actor who did stage backgrounds. Or it might have been his brother William, or neither man, who wielded the paintbrush. But one of them certainly owned the 42-centimetre-by-33-centimetre panel, depicting a man with a twinkle in his eye and a smirk on his lips. His pate is a little less balding than in other depictions of the Bard, and tufts of hair poof from the top and sides of his head. There’s a hint of colour in his cheeks, and a thin moustache and beard around his mouth. He’s wearing a silk shirt with a floppy collar under a dark grey doublet.
The panel itself is constructed of two pieces of solid oak glued together. There are just two spots of damage that possibly occurred early in the painting’s life: a section of wood sheared off the right side in a clean break and three holes along the top from where it was once hung. On the back is a now-faded rag paper label that once said: “Shakspere; Born April 23,1564; Died April 23-1616; Aged 52; This Likeness taken 1603; Age at that time 39 ys.”
A date inscription can be seen on the back of the Sanders portrait.Patti Gower/The Globe and Mail/The Globe and Mail
The scientific case for the painting rests on a battery of tests performed in the 1990s and 2000s.
First, a dendrochronologist at the University of Hamburg determined that, based on an analysis of the tree rings in the wooden panel, the oak that supplied it was likely felled in the Baltic region sometime as early as 1595 – putting it in the correct age range and plausible geographic location.
Then scientists at the Canadian Conservation Institute in Ottawa, led by Marie-Claude Corbeil, analyzed the paint. They found that the pigments and techniques used were consistent with other British paintings of the early 17th century and, through radiography and ultraviolet photography, determined the portrait had never been retouched or painted over – disproving the idea that it was a forgery made centuries later.
Finally, radiocarbon dating at the University of Toronto conducted on the paper label, and later analysis in Chicago of the ink on the paper, concluded the label was affixed to the back of the panel within a few decades of when the portrait was produced.
Lloyd DeWitt, who examined the Sanders portrait closely in 2013, when he was curator of European art at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), says he walked into his first investigation of it deeply skeptical. “I had already been primed to think of this as a fake, because I had already been through this before,” he says.
At an earlier job at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Mr. DeWitt had been asked to examine a painting from 1604 that depicted two men playing chess. Someone claimed those two men were Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, another lion of British drama. Mr. DeWitt says the painting techniques clearly indicated the work was Italian, not British, making it “inconceivable” the subjects were the British playwrights.
But when Mr. DeWitt put on gloves and examined the Sanders portrait for himself, then read the stacks of research already conducted, he says he was quickly convinced the painting had a stronger claim to depicting Shakespeare than even others that hung at the National Portrait Gallery in London. “Nobody is questioning the wooden panel or the paint layer or anything like that,” says Mr. DeWitt, now the chief curator at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va. “There’s nothing there that’s raising any questions. It’s all consistent.”
The only thing that may never be completely settled, he says, is whether the man depicted in the painting is indeed William Shakespeare. The only evidence of the man’s identity is the label on the back, which was added years later, along with genealogical research that puts the Sanders family in similar social circles as the Shakespeares.
“The questions are all in Sanders family myths and how much of this could be backed up by documentary evidence,” Mr. De Witt says. “Even then, it’s a solid case.”
This 17th-century engraving of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout is one of the few representations of the playwright done by someone who knew him in life, but it was created after his death.The Associated Press/AP
The Sanders portrait is important because very few authentic images of Shakespeare exist. In his day, it was uncommon for someone to have a portrait made unless they were rich or royal, and in 1603, Shakespeare was neither.
Among scholars, there is consensus about only two images and their claims to depict Shakespeare. One is the Droeshout portrait, engraved by Martin Droeshout, which was printed in the First Folio collection of Shakespeare’s plays in 1623 and is often still published with his work. The other is a funerary bust on his grave in Stratford-upon-Avon. Both images were endorsed by people who knew Shakespeare personally. But both images were also created posthumously.
The Sanders portrait is one of a handful of paintings that could have been created of the playwright while he was still alive – perhaps even as a sitting subject.
Daniel Fischlin, a professor at the University of Guelph who has become a close friend of the Sanders family through his study of the painting, believes the portrait was created when Shakespeare’s acting company, the King’s Men, won King James I’s patronage in 1603. The actors performed at Hampton Court Palace for royals who were isolating themselves as the Bubonic Plague ravaged London.
Mr. Fischlin says the Sanders portrait could have started out as a stage prop: The holes along the top suggest it was hung on an arras, and the placement of those holes suggests the painting fell, broke along the right side, and another hole was punched in to recentre it. In fact, Mr. Fischlin believes it could have been used in the staging of Hamlet, which was published in 1603 – the same year as the portrait. In the third act, before Hamlet kills Polonius, he marvels at a portrait of his father and describes it in a soliloquy that begins: “Look here, upon this picture …”
Whatever the exact origin of the painting, it remained in the hands of the Sanders family. John (or William) Sanders handed it down to his descendants, and so on. It wasn’t until the early 20th century – almost a dozen generations later – that the painting made its first blip on the public radar. Thomas Hales Sanders, a painter in London, showed the portrait to art critic M.H. Spielmann, who dismissed it in 1909 as a recent forgery. The painting passed to his son, Aloysius, who moved to Montreal in search of new opportunities. One of his daughters, Mary Agnes, brought the painting to New York in 1928 to exhibit at the Stern Brothers department store, in pursuit of a possible sale. Whether for wont of a buyer or because the family changed its mind about selling, she soon brought the painting back to Canada. Her brother, Frederick, later made a similar exhibit at an Eaton’s shop in Montreal in the 1960s, but once again took the portrait home. In 1971, the work passed to another sister, Catherine Sullivan (née Hales Sanders), who passed it the next year to her son, Lloyd Sullivan.
Lloyd Sullivan, a retired engineer, encouraged researchers to look deeper into the Sanders portrait's history.Dean Palmer
It was under Mr. Sullivan’s ownership that the painting drew serious public attention.
Mr. Sullivan was an engineer at Bell who’d moved to Ottawa after his youth in Montreal. In the 1990s, as a retirement project, he began to try to authenticate the portrait, working with scientists at the Canadian Conservation Institute and researchers in Germany and Britain. In 2001, the painting’s existence became public for the first time in a series of reports by The Globe and Mail’s Stephanie Nolen.
Reaction was swift. Canadian institutions such as the AGO and the Stratford Festival took an immediate interest. Symposiums were gathered, with many experts contributing new evidence to back up the family’s claim. At a 2002 conference at the University of Toronto, for example, Jenny Tiramani of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London said the subject’s doublet was perfectly in keeping with what the playwright would have worn at the time. And in 2006, it was hung in the National Portrait Gallery in London, along with five other portraits claiming to be contemporaneous likenesses of Shakespeare. (At least two of those have since been discredited, and the rest remain, like the Sanders, a matter of academic debate.)
As Mr. Sullivan grew older, he became more determined to create a legacy for his family through the painting. But he also had to deal with the millions of dollars in debt he’d accrued trying to prove its authenticity, exhausting his life savings in the process. Lawyers who had initially worked pro bono would soon come to collect.
He briefly considered selling the painting at auction, and in 2012, he and Mr. Fischlin flew to New York, where it was expected to fetch millions. But like his predecessors, Mr. Sullivan cancelled the Sotheby’s sale and brought the painting home.
Mr. Fischlin says Mr. Sullivan was more interested in his family’s legacy than in fetching the best price at auction. “The more people who imagine the big payoff at the end of it, the more disastrous it is, really,” Mr. Fischlin says.
That’s when discussions began in earnest to get the painting on the walls of a public gallery in Canada. But as with most major art deals in this country, the obstacle was money.
Visitors walk through the atrium of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa this past July, its first day of reopening in the COVID-19 pandemic.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press/The Canadian Press
The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa is the only major gallery with a sizeable acquisition budget: $8-million a year, provided by Parliament. But it wasn’t interested in the Sanders – the gallery collects art based on the painter (in this case, a virtual unknown), not the subject matter (no matter how famous).
Few other galleries have a budget to buy art; instead, they rely on donations to expand their collections. Mr. Sullivan couldn’t give away the painting for free, however, because it would leave him to fend off creditors without his most valuable asset. And though he believed he had clear title to the painting based on family wills, some of his relatives expected to get a cut if the painting were sold.
For it to end up in a public gallery, a third party would have to supply the money. Canadian law encourages this through a generous tax break administered by the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board (CCPERB). The federal board has the power to bestow a tax credit worth the full value of the work, plus a break on the capital gains. It’s one of the most generous tax credits in Canada and every year it prompts wealthy Canadians to donate their art to galleries rather than selling it on the open market.
The credit wouldn’t be much use to the Sanders family, since they couldn’t use it to pay off their debts. For a high-net-worth collector, however, the ability to write off millions in income would be quite useful. So the family hatched a plan: It would sell the portrait to a wealthy Canadian for millions of dollars, on the condition that the buyer donate it to a public institution. That institution would then go to CCPERB and apply for the tax break on behalf of the buyer. There was an element of risk, though, in that the CCPERB could turn down the request, which is within its rights to do.
Mr. Sullivan decided to find the institution first, so they could team up to find a donor. In 2013, he tried to work out a deal with the AGO, which had first displayed the painting after its existence became public.
Visitors cross the Art Gallery of Ontario's Walker Court.Tijana Martin/ The Globe and Mail/The Globe and Mail
Victor Wiener, an international art appraiser based in New York who was hired by the AGO during its due diligence, says he was impressed by the “extraordinary” condition of the painting, considering it had been kept in private homes for so many years. “It blew my socks off,” he says.
In 2016, he valued the painting at $50-million, based on its significance to the study of Shakespeare, as well as the story of the Sanders family attached to it. According to Mr. Wiener, that value has likely risen much higher in the past few years, as sales of unique works – including the Salvator Mundi, a mysterious Renaissance piece purportedly by Leonardo Da Vinci that sold for US$450-million in 2017 – have vastly overtaken earlier estimates. “There’s a whole lot of interest in trophy art,” he says.
The Sanders family asked for a fraction of that appraisal – initially just a few million to settle their debts. The AGO found someone to act as the third party to grease the donation’s wheels. But other members of the family were pushing Mr. Sullivan and his lawyers to get more money out of the deal by treating the intellectual property of the painting’s history as separate from the physical artifact. Negotiations dragged and the prospective donor walked away.
Meanwhile, AGO leaders who had been pushing for the acquisition – namely Mr. DeWitt and long-time director Matthew Teitelbaum – left to take jobs in the United States, and their replacements were less keen on the Sanders. It soon become clear it wouldn’t remain with the AGO. And though potential buyers in Britain and the United States showed interest, Mr. Sullivan was determined to keep the painting in Canada.
The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press/The Canadian Press
In 2016, the family began serious talks with the ROM, which hoped to make the Sanders portrait a centrepiece of its exhibits. Finding a donor was still difficult, however, because the family didn’t know a lot of high-net-worth individuals. Eventually they found someone who agreed to act as financial go-between with the ROM: Guelph lawyer Anthony Speciale.
The deal was set to close by the end of May, 2020. But then Mr. Speciale died suddenly in December, 2018. Negotiations continued with his widow, Louise Cherevaty, and other family members. But the Sanders family says they stopped hearing from the potential donors in the final months leading up to the deal’s close. “The promises that were made were not lived up to,” says lawyer Lee Villar, who represents the Sanders family.
No one from the Speciale family could be reached for this story. The Speciale law corporation closed its doors earlier this year, and the phone number associated with Ms. Cherevaty’s real estate practice has been disconnected. David Steinberg, a partner at Dentons who at one point represented the Speciales, did not respond to requests for comment.
Steven Guilbeault is the federal Heritage Minister.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press/The Canadian Press
In May, Mr. Fischlin says he started to get concerned that the deal would fall through and wrote to Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault asking for government assistance on behalf of the Sanders family. Mr. Fischlin says they’re currently hoping to receive between $7-million and $10-million from the painting to settle their debts.
Camille Gagné-Raynauld, press secretary to the minister, says the tax break administered by CCPERB is the only option available for government assistance. “There are no other programs in the department that could support the acquisition of the Sanders portrait at the moment,” she told The Globe.
For its part, the ROM is still interested in acquiring the work. “The Sanders portrait is a painting with a tremendously fascinating history and an intriguing connection to the most important figure in literary history,” ROM director Josh Basseches said in a statement. “Were a donor to be interested in gifting the portrait to the ROM, we would be excited to receive it and to present it to the public.”
The Sanders family Bible lies open in front of the portrait.Patti Gower/The Globe and Mail/The Globe and Mail
Members of the Sanders family were disappointed to see the deal fall through. But even more devastating was a series of tragedies that befell them over the past year.
Mr. Sullivan, who spent his final years trying to find a permanent home for the painting, died in August, 2019, at the age of 86, after a series of health challenges that included pneumonia. His wife, Mary, died months later of Alzheimer’s.
As Mr. Sullivan’s health grew worse, guardianship of the painting fell to his cousin, James Hale-Sanders, a retired manager in the trucking industry. Mr. Hale-Sanders, 71, led negotiations even while caring for his wife, Elizabeth, who also died of Alzheimer’s in November, 2019.
In the spring, as it became clear that another major deal would fall through, he suffered a health incident that led to days in hospital and weeks in physical rehabilitation. He’s now living with one of his two daughters as he recovers.
Mr. Fischlin says Mr. Sullivan had always been animated by pride in his family. He recalled the time the two of them travelled to New York for the Sotheby’s auction, Mr. Sullivan carrying the priceless portrait in a garbage bag under his arm. As they stood in the hotel lobby before heading to the auction house, a stranger asked Mr. Sullivan what he was carrying. He casually pulled the painting out of the trash bag and spent an hour telling his story while the auctioneers waited.
Mr. Fischlin says many of his final conversations with Mr. Sullivan – as the retired engineer lay in his hospital bed – were about how far the journey had taken them, even if the recognition he sought was not quite done. “At the end of Lloyd’s life, I think he understood,” Mr. Fischlin says. “He said, ‘This is far beyond what I was expecting or how difficult I thought this would be when I started.‘ It would have been a lot easier not to do what they’ve done.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the familial relationship between its past owner and its current one. In fact, Lloyd Sullivan and James Hale-Sanders are cousins.
