Single portrait of Richard Clough

General information
Original location Antwerp? (see remarks)
Current location Private collection
Artist Unknown (Netherlandish)
Date ca. 1564 (see remarks)
Material Oil on panel
Visual elements
Short description Portrait of a bearded man, half-length, turned to the right, looking to the viewer. He has a glove in his right hand and carries a sword.
Depicted pilgrim
Personal information
Name Richard Clough (based on eighteenth-century engraved copy, see remarks)
Year of birth ca. 1522 (derived from age mentioned on paiting)
Place of birth Denbigh, Wales
Social status / profession Son of a glove maker, who moved to London at a young age; ca. 1552: Factor in the service of Thomas Gresham, English royal agent; From 1557 based in Antwerp for Gresham; Regular reporter on political and diplomatic issues for Gresham and William Cecil, Lord Burghley; Involved in the acquisition of Flemish paintings for the English court; 1567: Marriage with Katherine Tudor (Katheryn of Berain); 1567: Return to Wales
Coat of arms Top left, hanging from the frame: late renaissance shield - in silver a red Jerusalem cross
Other known portraits
  • Ludger tom Ring the Younger, Round single portrait of Richard Clough, 1564 (Münster, LWL-Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, inv. no. 2012 LM
  • Ludger tom Ring the Younger, Half-length portrait of Richard Clough, 1564 (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie der Staatlichen Museen, inv. no. M 511)
  • Ludger tom Ring the Younger, Kitchen piece with the Wedding in Kana (lost in 1945, formerly Berlin, Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum) with two miniature portraits of the painter and the presumed commissioner Richard Clough
  • Unknown artist, Portrait of Richard Clough, ca. 1564 (Auction Christie's, 1931, current location unknown)
All these portraits are considered to be the same person based on distinct facial features and the mentions of year and age on the paintings.
Pilgrimages
Year of pilgrimage to Jerusalem before 1552 (Clough is mentioned to have made the pilgrimage in his London years)
Attributes Jerusalem pilgrimage Jerusalem cross on coat of arms
Death
Year of death 1570
Place of death Hamburg
Additional information
General remarks Two late eighteenth-century engravings of this portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in Londen, inv. nos. NPG D25450 and NPG D33536, identify the sitter as Richard Clough, Knight.
Richard Clough lived in Antwerp when the portrait was made, which makes it likely that the painting was also originally placed somewhere in that city.
The other known portraits of Richard Clough show him at about the same age, and are dated 1462-1464. It is therefore likely that this portrait was made around the same year, although it might also be a copy of another portrait made around that time.
Richard Clough wrote a famous account of the Iconoclastic Fury in Antwerp in 1566 in a letter.
Literature
  • Blanchard, Ian, Clough, Richard, in Henry Colin Gray Matthew, Brian Harrison with the British Academy (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. From the Earliest Time to the Year 2000 (Oxford 2004), vol. 12, pp. 207-209
  • Cooper, Tarnya, Citizen Portrait. Portrait Painting and the Urban Elite of Tudor and Jacobean England and Wales (New Haven and London 2012), p. 92
  • Lorenz, Angelika (ed.), Die Maler tom Ring, 2 vols. (Münster 1996), vol. 2, pp. 454 (cat. 108), 614 (WVZ 147)
  • Luckhardt, Jochen, Das Küchenstück von Ludger tom Ring d. J. (1562): Kunst in Antwerpen zwischen Münster und Braunschweig (Braunschweig 2013)
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