English School

Portrait Bust of John Milton
(1608-1674)

white marble bust on a later socle

26 inches (66 cm.) high

PROVENANCE:
Dr. Roland Mushat Frye, 1922-2005

Milton was born on December 9, 1608 in Bread Street, Cheapside, the third son of John Milton, a scrivener and composer. He was educated by a private tutor, Thomas Young, who gave him a fine grounding in the classics, and then at St Paul’s School. His earliest poems, English paraphrases of psalms 114 and 136, were composed when he was fifteen, and he wrote poetry in Italian, Latin and English throughout his years at Christ’s College, Cambridge. He graduated with a Masters in the summer of 1632 and returned to live with his father who had retired to a house at Horton, Buckinghamshire, at which time he wrote his lyrical poems, Il Pensero and L’Allegro and the masque, Comus (1634) which was performed for John Egerton, 1st Earl of Bridgewater, in Ludlow. His last important early poem was written in 1637 in memory of his fellow at Christ’s College, Edward King, Lycidas, in which he registers his growing disaffection with the Caroline church, the greed of the clergy and the power of the bishops in particular, themes to which he was to return to in his polemical tracts of 1641 and 1642.

In April of 1638 Milton traveled to the continent and visited France, Italy and Switzerland before returning to England fifteen months later where he took a house in Aldersgate Street, London, and began taking pupils. In 1643 he married Mary, eldest daughter of Richard Powell near Shotover, Oxfordshire, however the marriage was not a success and she returned to her father within the month, prompting Milton to write (1643-1645) arguing for more leniency in the grounds for the divorce. The notoriety that these pamphlets occasioned led to attacks on Milton from various clerics, and also parliament, who sought to suppress his writings which had been published without license, which in turn led to his publication of Areopagitica (1644) advocating tolerance towards unlicensed printing. In 1645, Milton’s estranged wife returned to him and he reluctantly took her back and by her had three daughters, Anne, Mary and Deborah.

During the trial of Charles I in January of 1649, Milton wrote his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and declared on the title page that ’it is lawful ... for any who have the power to call to account a Tyrant or wicked King and after due conviction, to depose, & put him to death’, sentiments which may have prompted the republican parliament to appoint him Secretary for Foreign Tongues and authorized him to rebuff a number of pamphlets sympathetic to the Royal cause that appeared after the King’s execution.

By 1652 he had entirely lost his sight, probably due to glaucoma, and was assisted in his duties for the Council of State by the metaphysical poet, Andrew Marvell, and continued his secretaryship during the protectorate of Richard Cromwell. In 1658 he began writing his most celebrated work, Paradise Lost which he completed in 1663, and which was greatly admired by his contemporaries, John Dryden and Andrew Marvell. Following the Restoration he was briefly arrested. The plague in 1665 drove Milton to retire to a cottage in Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire, where he wrote his final great poems, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (published in 1671). He died on November 8, 1674 and was buried alongside his father in St. Giles’s Cripplegate.

The present marble bust is an excellent example of the high-quality sculpted likenesses of Milton produced in the first half of the eighteenth century in England, fuelled by a revival of interest in the poet’s work. Executed by an anonymous sculptor or workshop, the likeness is based on a contemporary line engraving executed in 1670 by William Faithorne (1616?-1691). Several versions of the present bust exist including a reduced version, measuring 18 inches high, in the National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 3781).

Roland Mushat Frye was born in Birmingham, Alabama and received three degrees including his Ph.D., from Princeton University. After active service in World War II, he joined the faculty at Emory University in Atlanta before becoming a research professor at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. However, he returned to teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965 where he was Schelling Professor of English Literature until his retirement in 1983. A Presbyterian Church elder, much of his scholarship explored religious topics, particularly in the works of Milton and Shakespeare. One of his best known works was the award-winning, Milton’s Imagery and the Visual Arts, published in 1978 by Princeton University Press.

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