A Man Without a Face: The Lost Portrait of Sir Richard Lane

The accomplished royal painter, Daniel Mytens, painted a portrait of the newly named Lord Keeper Richard Lane in wartime Oxford in 1644. That portrait (property of G.W. Heneage, a descendant of Margaret Lane’s family line) was removed from the Cambridge archives for the 1866 Special National Exhibition of Portraits in Kew. After the exhibition, the portrait was never returned to Cambridge, and is now assumed lost.

Beyond providing a singular, well-rendered image of the man, this portrait is interesting when compared to those of other Lord Keepers of the Great Seal.  Lane is not wearing the usual ornate robes of this distinguished office, but rather the attire of a normal judge of the time.  This makes sense, of course, when considering the harrowing time and place (wartime Oxford) in which it was painted.  It is understandable that having ornate robes created for Lord Keeper Lane was not a priority at that time.  Independent of this image, I had been able to separately find a photograph of the section of wall containing this portrait at the 1866 exhibition. It was in a book gifted to Queen Victoria that is now part of the Royal Trust collection at Windsor Castle.  Although recognizable as the same painting, the details in that photograph are not nearly as clear as in the image now part of the NYPL collection. But it is still unique information to see how it was presented in the 1866 exhibition, and what its frame looked like!

In studying the exhibition, I became fascinated by the exhibition gallery itself.  It was held in the last vestige of an absolutely massive 21 acre exhibition hall built for the International Exhibition of 1862.  This utterly cavernous glass sheathed, iron-framed hall was built adjacent to the vast, terraced and enclosed gardens of the Royal Horticultural Society.  Both of these Kew venues are long gone today, and the site is partially occupied by the Natural History Museum and Royal Albert Hall.

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