Richard Carruthers (1792-1876)
Portrait of William Wordsworth
1817
painting
(oil painting)
737 x 610 mm
Shows Wordsworth age 47. It was commissioned by Mary Wordsworth’s cousin Thomas Monkhouse. Carruthers depicts Wordsworth with his head bowed onto his hand, a pose that was held to be characteristic of poets and is also found in later portraits by Pickersgill and Benjamin Robert Haydon. The portrait shows Wordsworth with a landscape background. It was the first portrait of Wordsworth to be engraved (by Henry Meyer for the New Monthly Magazine, 1st February 1819) and as such was for years the best known image of the poet. Until Wordsworth was 61 any likeness in print would be a version of the Carruthers portrait.
Accordingly this portrait was so lifelike that his sister Dorothy once thought that it was Wordsworth himself: 'When D. came home on Sat. the Portrait was set at the end of the sofa which faces the dining room door to which door you approach by a long passage the door being open she saw it immediately and as she turned into the passage said Why William has got laid up on the sofa already!...and we have all at times started and taken it for him' (letter from Joanna Hutchinson to John Monkhouse, 16 September 1817) (Information from Frances Blanshard, Portraits of Wordsworth, 1959)
For prints based on this painting see C252, C261 and C329 (ii).
Provenance:
Bequest of Joanna Hutchinson, 1966
Exhibited:
RW
What We Treasure: Art out of the Archive, Wordsworth Grasmere, 2025-6
Literature:
Blanchard, F., 1959, Portraits of Wordsworth, Allen & Unwin (p.146 IX)
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