Panel Painting William Burton (1575-1645)
Object number
LDSAL303
Artist/Designer/Maker
- Artist
Unknown artist
Unknown artist
Production date
1604
Material
Oak
oil paint
oil paint
Technique
Oil on panel
Dimensions
Height: 901mm
Width: 724mm
Width: 724mm
Location
Burlington House - on display
Content description
The three-quarter-length portrait shows Burton at the age of twenty-nine, shortly after he had been called to the bar and some three years before his marriage. He is flanked on the right by a depiction of a skeleton on a medallion. The origin of the Spanish epigram uttered by the skeleton is unknown, although the works of Miguel de Cervantes or his contemporaries might be the source.
Inscriptions
Inscription content
Will’mus Burton filius natu maximus Radulfi Burton de Lindley com: Leic: Armig: Socius Interioris Templi et Apprenticius legum Angliæ + 25. Aug: + 1604 + An: Æt + 29 +
Inscriber role/association
Artist
Inscription content
Mira lo galardon
Inscriber role/association
Artist
Inscription content
Hic terminus ad quem
Inscriber role/association
Artist
Inscription content
LVX, VITA
Inscriber role/association
Artist
Oil on oak panel portrait of the antiquary William Burton (1575-1645).
William Burton (1575-1645) was the older brother of Robert Burton (1577-1640), author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).
William was educated at Oxford, admitted to the Inner Temple in 1593 and called to the bar in 1603, retiring soon after to his Staffordshire estate because of ill health. On his father’s death in 1619, William inherited his main estate at Lindley. His interest in antiquarian topography, still in its early stages as a discipline, placed Burton at the centre of a group of like-minded scholars in the Midlands. Burton acquired the topographical notebooks of the seminal Tudor antiquary John Leland, familiarising his circle with Leland’s Itinerary of c 1535-43.
In 1622, Burton published 'The Description of Leicestershire', an innovative study of the county’s history and antiquities, of which the Society’s holds a first edition. Burton’s plan to produce a second edition was never realised but the book remains one of the principal topographies published in England before 1660, and Burton occupies a significant position between William Camden and William Dugdale in the succession of English topographical scholars. William Dugdale was inspired by it to embark on a similar record of Warwickshire. John Nichols incorporated much of Burton’s Leicestershire material in his four-volume study of the county, consulting no fewer than twenty-three annotated copies of the 1622 edition in the process.
The Society’s painting has been attributed to the English artist William Segar, whose surviving documented works include the portrait of Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex of 1590 in Dublin (comp. fig. 47.1). A follower of Nicholas Hilliard (active 1547; d 1619) and a fashionable painter to the nobility, Segar was also a herald and was admitted to the College of Arms in June 1585, where he became Garter King of Arms (1607-33) and was knighted in 1617.
William was educated at Oxford, admitted to the Inner Temple in 1593 and called to the bar in 1603, retiring soon after to his Staffordshire estate because of ill health. On his father’s death in 1619, William inherited his main estate at Lindley. His interest in antiquarian topography, still in its early stages as a discipline, placed Burton at the centre of a group of like-minded scholars in the Midlands. Burton acquired the topographical notebooks of the seminal Tudor antiquary John Leland, familiarising his circle with Leland’s Itinerary of c 1535-43.
In 1622, Burton published 'The Description of Leicestershire', an innovative study of the county’s history and antiquities, of which the Society’s holds a first edition. Burton’s plan to produce a second edition was never realised but the book remains one of the principal topographies published in England before 1660, and Burton occupies a significant position between William Camden and William Dugdale in the succession of English topographical scholars. William Dugdale was inspired by it to embark on a similar record of Warwickshire. John Nichols incorporated much of Burton’s Leicestershire material in his four-volume study of the county, consulting no fewer than twenty-three annotated copies of the 1622 edition in the process.
The Society’s painting has been attributed to the English artist William Segar, whose surviving documented works include the portrait of Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex of 1590 in Dublin (comp. fig. 47.1). A follower of Nicholas Hilliard (active 1547; d 1619) and a fashionable painter to the nobility, Segar was also a herald and was admitted to the College of Arms in June 1585, where he became Garter King of Arms (1607-33) and was knighted in 1617.