Cobbe Portrait of Southampton
The claims regarding this portrait follow from research into another portrait in the Cobbe collection, also displayed at Hatchlands Park, which came to public attention in 2002 when the painting, which for three centuries had been identified as a portrait of a woman, 'Lady Norton', was correctly identified as a portrait of a young man. The coincidence of distinctive features, the extraordinarily long hair, the high forehead, the long nose terminating in a bulb and the slender upper lip with known portraits of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, led to the conclusion that it depicted Shakespeare's patron the 3rd Earl of Southampton himself, whose great-granddaughter was Lady Elizabeth Norton. The portrait is the earliest extant oil portrait of the androgynous-looking youthful Earl to survive and shows him at the time that Shakespeare dedicated his long poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) to him. The Earl has often been suggested as the "Fair Youth" who is the love object in some of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Alastair Laing of the National Trust wrote at the time that, 'I am very happy indeed about the identification. Given the connection to Shakespeare and his sonnets, it is a very, very exciting discovery.'
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