The Earl of Verulam owns a portrait of Bacon by the Dutch artist, Paul Van Somer. Mr. Spedding dates the picture 1618 or thereabout, after Bacon had been made Lord Chancellor and created Baron Verulam. Van Somer's work is more interesting for the details of the dress of the period than for character, and he gives Lord Chancellor Bacon a rather wooden and expressionless face. He is painted in his robe and wearing a hat. A second portrait at Gorhambury, without a hat, is there attributed to Van Somer. Mr. Spedding thinks it is not a Van Somer, but a copy of the other done by an inferior artist at some later period when the fashion of painting people with the head covered had gone out. The reputed Van Somer, with a very wooden face, is figured in Vol. II of John Nicol's Francis Bacon: His Life and Philosophy.
The frontispiece of Vol. I of James Spedding's edition of Bacon is an engraving after the old print of Simon Pass. This artist, whose name is variously spelled Pass, Van de Pas, or Passe, Passaeus, was one of the earliest copperplate engravers in England, having emigrated from the Netherlands to pursue his art in London. Mr. Spedding thought that he had "some reason to suspect" that Pass's engraving was made from a painting, now lost, by the Dutch artist, Cornelius Jannsen Van Ceulen. Whoever the artist, his work is much superior to that of Van Somer. He portrays a handsome man, well worthy to have developed out of the graceful youth of the Hilliard miniature and the beautiful boy of the Italian bust.
