Gerard Johnson (

Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...

: ''Gheerart Janssen''; fl. 1612–1623) was a sculptor working in Jacobean England who is traditionally supposed to have created

Shakespeare's funerary monument The Shakespeare funerary monument is a memorial to William Shakespeare located inside Holy Trinity Church at Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, the church in which Shakespeare was baptised and where he was buried in the chancel two days afte ...

(although this attribution has more recently been challenged). In May 1612 Johnson was paid for making part of a fountain for the east garden at

Hatfield House Hatfield House is a country house set in a large park, the Great Park, on the eastern side of the town of Hatfield, Hertfordshire, England. The present Jacobean house, a leading example of the prodigy house, was built in 1611 by Robert Ceci ...

Hertfordshire Hertfordshire ( or ; often abbreviated Herts) is one of the home counties in southern England. It borders Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire to the north, Essex to the east, Greater London to the south, and Buckinghamshire to the west. For govern ...

. His father,

Gerard Johnson the elder Gerard Johnson the elder (died 1611) is the Anglicised form of Gheerart Janssen, an English sculptor who operated a monument workshop in Elizabethan and Jacobean England and the father of Gerard Johnson the younger, who is thought to have create ...

, came to England in 1567 from Holland. He established himself as a sculptor of

funerary monument Funerary art is any work of art forming, or placed in, a repository for the remains of the dead. The term encompasses a wide variety of forms, including cenotaphs ("empty tombs"), tomb-like monuments which do not contain human remains, and comm ...

s in London. Gerard the elder worked on a monument to the 1st Earl of Southampton, which also depicts Shakespeare's patron, the 3rd Earl, as a young man. Shakespeare would probably have seen the monument if he had stayed at

Titchfield Titchfield is a village in southern Hampshire, by the River Meon. The village has a history stretching back to the 6th century. During the medieval period, the village operated a small port and market. Near to the village are the ruins of Titch ...

. Shaespeare's monument is in Holy Trinity Church,

Stratford upon Avon Stratford-upon-Avon (), commonly known as just Stratford, is a market town and civil parish in the Stratford-on-Avon district, in the county of Warwickshire, in the West Midlands region of England. It is situated on the River Avon, north-wes ...

, and may have been commissioned by his son-in-law

John Hall John Hall may refer to: Academics * John Hall (NYU President) (fl. c. 1890), American academic * John A. Hall (born 1949), sociology professor at McGill University, Montreal * John F. Hall (born 1951), professor of classics at Brigham Young Unive ...

. The attribution to Gerard Johnson is contained in Sir

William Dugdale Sir William Dugdale (12 September 1605 – 10 February 1686) was an English antiquary and herald. As a scholar he was influential in the development of medieval history as an academic subject. Life Dugdale was born at Shustoke, near Coleshi ...

's ''Antiquities of Warwickshire'', published in 1656, but no other evidence of his authorship exists. Dugdale also states that the Gerard the younger created the memorial in Holy Trinity church to Shakespeare's friend John Combe, who left the playwright a legacy in his will. This would probably have been installed in 1615 while Shakespeare was still alive. It is also possible that Shakespeare knew the Johnson family from his London days, since their workshop was close to the

Globe theatre The Globe Theatre was a theatre in London associated with William Shakespeare. It was built in 1599 by Shakespeare's playing company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, on land owned by Thomas Brend and inherited by his son, Nicholas Brend, and gra ...

. In 1849 a death mask of Shakespeare was made public by a German artist, Ludwig Becker, who linked it to a painting which, he claimed, depicted Shakespeare and resembled the mask. The mask, known as the "Kesselstadt death mask" was given publicity when it was declared authentic by the scientist

Richard Owen Sir Richard Owen (20 July 1804 – 18 December 1892) was an English biologist, comparative anatomist and paleontologist. Owen is generally considered to have been an outstanding naturalist with a remarkable gift for interpreting fossils. Owe ...

, who also claimed that the Stratford memorial was based on it. The artist

Henry Wallis Henry Wallis (21 February 1830 – 20 December 1916) was a British Pre-Raphaelite painter, writer and collector. Wallis was born in London on 21 February 1830, but his father's name and occupation are unknown. When in 1845 his mother, Mary ...

painted a picture depicting the sculptor working on the monument while looking at the mask. The sculptor

Lord Ronald Gower Lord Ronald Charles Sutherland-Leveson-Gower (2 August 1845 – 9 March 1916), was a British sculptor, best known for his statue of Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon. He also wrote biographies of Marie Antoinette and Joan of Arc, as well as s ...

also believed in the authenticity of the mask. When he created the large public Shakespeare statue in Stratford in 1888, he based the facial features on it. He also attempted to buy it for the nation. The mask is now generally believed to be a fake, though its authenticity claim was revived in 1998. In 2021, Lena Cowen Orlin challenged the attribution of Shakespeare's monument to Gerard Johnson, arguing that it was more probably by Gerard's brother,

Nicholas Johnson Nicholas Johnson (born September 23, 1934) is an American academic and lawyer. He wrote ''How to Talk Back to Your Television Set'' and was a Federal Communications Commission commissioner from 1966 to 1973. He is retired from teaching at the Un ...

, was commissioned by Shakespeare himself during his lifetime, and was sculpted from the life.

References

Gallery

File:Stratford Holy Trinity Church3.jpg, The monument in situ File:ShakespeareMonument cropped.jpg, Close-up of the sculpture File:Tomb of John Combe.jpg, The tomb of John Combe {{DEFAULTSORT:Johnson, Gerard English sculptors English male sculptors Portraits of William Shakespeare