Portrait of the mathematician as a young man: Revisiting Trinity's Tayler picture

Abstract

A 17th-century oil painting by an unknown artist, once owned by the Tayler family and now in the collection of Trinity College, Cambridge, is currently identified as a portrait of a young Isaac Barrow. The sitter is shown pointing to a proposition in Barrow's 1655 edition of Euclid's Elements, but the portrait bears little resemblance to other depictions of Barrow. Moreover, Barrow is unlikely to have posed with that book, which appeared in print eight months after he had left England on a four-year tour of the Continent. Plausible alternatives are that the portrait is of Francis Willughby or Isaac Newton, both of whom resembled the man pictured and may be characterized as disciples of Barrow. If the Tayler were Newton's portrait, it could shed light on the patronage that allowed him to rise from undergraduate servant ("subsizar") to Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in only five and half years.

Figures (12)

• Figure 1: Portrait of Isaac Newton by Godfrey Kneller, 1689, oil on canvas, in the private collection of the Earl of Portsmouth at Farleigh House, in Farleigh Wallop, Hampshire. Image courtesy of the Farleigh Wallop Estate.
• Figure 2: (a) Reproduction (Swantype) of a portrait by an unknown artist, from the collection of Col. George Bramston Archer Houblon (1843--1913) at Hallingbury Place, near Bishop's Stortford. This appears in Ref. Houblon with the caption "Sir Isaac Newton (as a youth)". This book is in the public domain. (b) Portrait of an unknown young man by Henry Cook, oil on canvas, 1669, collection of St Catharine's College, Cambridge.Catz-gentleman This is identified in Ref. Churchill as "the earliest portrait of Sir Isaac Newton". Image courtesy of the Master and Fellows of St Catharine's College, Cambridge.
• Figure 3: (a) Engraving by Burnet Reading, dated 1799. The inscription reads Sir Isaac Newton, when Bachelor of Arts in Trinity College, Cambridge. Engraved by Bt. Reading from a Head painted by Sir Peter Lely in the Possession of the Right Honorable Lord Viscount Cremorne.Reading Image from Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository, reproduced here under the terms of the Creative Commons license. (b) Portrait of a mathematician by Mary Beale (1633--1699), oil on canvas, currently in a private collection.Beale Image courtesy of Philip Mould & Company.
• Figure 4: Portrait of Isaac Barrow by Mary Beale, oil on canvas, collection of Trinity College, Cambridge (TC Oils P 17). Image courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.
• Figure 5: (a) Drawing of Isaac Barrow by David Loggan, plumbago on vellum, 1676, National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 1876). (b) Engraving by Loggan used as frontispiece to Barrow's Several Sermons Against Evil-Speaking (1678). Images courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.