Robert Hooke - Likenesses

Likenesses

No authenticated portrait of Robert Hooke exists, a situation sometimes attributed to the heated conflicts between Hooke and Isaac Newton. In Hooke's time, the Royal Society met at Gresham College, but within a few months of Hooke's death Newton became the Society's president and plans were laid for a new meeting place. When the move to new quarters finally was made a few years later, in 1710, Hooke's Royal Society portrait went missing, and has yet to be found.

Time magazine published a portrait, supposedly of Hooke, in its 3 July 1939 issue. However, when the source was traced by Ashley Montagu, it was found to lack a verifiable connection to Hooke. Moreover, Montagu found that contemporary written descriptions of Hooke's appearance agreed with one another, but that neither matched Time's alleged picture of him.

In 2003, historian Lisa Jardine claimed that a recently discovered portrait was of Hooke, but this claim was disproved by William Jensen of the University of Cincinnati. The portrait identified by Jardine, in fact, depicts the Flemish scholar Jan Baptist van Helmont.

Other possible likenesses of Hooke include the following:

• A seal used by Hooke displays an unusual profile portrait of a man's head, which some have argued portrays Hooke.
• The engraved frontispiece to the 1728 edition of Chambers' Cyclopedia shows a drawing of a bust of Robert Hooke. The extent to which the drawing is based on an actual work of art is unknown.
• A memorial window existed at St Helen's Bishopsgate in London, but it was a formulaic rendering, not a likeness. The window was destroyed in the 1993 Bishopsgate bombing.

In 2003 history painter Rita Greer embarked on a self-funded project to memorialize Hooke. The Rita Greer Robert Hooke project aimed to produce credible images of him, both painted and drawn, that fitted his contemporary descriptions drawn from two sources: John Aubrey and Richard Waller. Greer's images of Hooke, his life and work have been used for TV programmes in UK and US, in books, magazines and for PR.