You can picture Newton. You can picture Boyle, Wren, Halley, Pepys, Leibniz and Huygens, because they were all painted and the paintings hang in institutions that look after them.
Robert Hooke, who was Curator of Experiments and then Secretary of the Royal Society, who published Micrographia, who worked out the law of elasticity that carries his name, who surveyed half of London after the Great Fire and who designed buildings still standing, has no authenticated portrait. Not one.
Every image of him you have ever seen is either a modern reconstruction or somebody else.
What We Know He Looked Like
We are not short of descriptions, and they are unflattering in the way that only seventeenth century English prose can be.
John Aubrey, who liked him, wrote that he was “but of midling stature, something crooked, pale faced, and his face but little below, but his head is lardge; his eie full and popping, and not quick; a grey eie. He haz a delicate head of haire, browne, and of an excellent moist curle.”
Richard Waller, who edited Hooke’s posthumous works in 1705 and had known him well, was harsher. He described him as “despicable” in person, very crooked, pale and lean, latterly nothing but skin and bone, with grey full eyes and a sharp ingenious look when younger, a thin nose, a wide mouth with a thin upper lip, a sharp chin and a large forehead.
The crookedness was real and is usually attributed to a spinal deformity that developed in his twenties, possibly from long hours hunched over instruments, possibly scoliosis. He was in poor health for most of his life and dosed himself relentlessly, recording the results in his diary.
So we have a face in words: large head, popping grey eyes, curled brown hair, thin and stooped. What we do not have is a picture.
The Case Against Newton
The story is repeated everywhere, and it goes like this. A portrait of Hooke hung in the Royal Society’s rooms at Gresham College. Hooke died in March 1703. Newton was elected President of the Royal Society in November 1703. In 1710 the Society moved to new premises in Crane Court, under Newton’s presidency and with Newton personally supervising the transfer of the collections. The portrait was never seen again.
The motive is not in dispute. The two men had been at each other for thirty years.
It started in 1672, when Newton submitted his first paper on light and colours and Hooke, as the Society’s curator, reviewed it dismissively and claimed the substance was already in his own Micrographia. Newton was thin skinned to a degree that is difficult to overstate, and withdrew from publishing for years.
It flared again in 1679 and 1680 in correspondence about the path of a falling body and the shape of orbits, where Hooke made suggestions that were genuinely useful to Newton. And it detonated in 1686, when Hooke claimed publicly that he had given Newton the inverse square law and deserved acknowledgement in the Principia. Newton’s response was to go through the manuscript removing Hooke’s name where he could, and to write to Halley that Hooke had done nothing but guess.
Hooke’s claim was partly fair and partly not. He had the intuition that gravity falls off as the square of the distance. He could not do the mathematics that turns an intuition into an orbit, and Newton could, and Newton knew the difference mattered.
Why the Case Does Not Quite Hold
Here is where the story needs handling carefully, because it is a good story and good stories get repeated past the point the evidence supports.
No document says Newton destroyed a portrait of Hooke. There is no record of an order, no witness, no inventory entry crossed out. The evidence is an absence plus a motive plus an opportunity, which in a courtroom would not be enough.
There are also duller explanations. It is not certain that a portrait of Hooke ever hung at Gresham College; the strongest evidence is indirect. Collections in the early eighteenth century were handled with a casualness that would horrify a modern curator, and things were lost in the move, given away, or left to rot. Hooke was not a wealthy man commissioning grand oils of himself, and he had no family to preserve his likeness after his death. He never married and his heir was a niece.
And Hooke’s reputation declined quickly for reasons that had nothing to do with paintings. He worked on an enormous range of things and finished comparatively few of them, which is precisely the profile that a century organising itself around great books and single great discoveries has no shelf for.
The honest verdict is that Newton had the motive and the means, that he demonstrably tried to erase Hooke from the written record, and that we cannot show he did it to a canvas. Which is unsatisfying, and true.
The Portrait That Turned Out to Be Somebody Else
In 2003, the tercentenary of Hooke’s death, the historian Lisa Jardine announced that she had identified a portrait of him in the collection of the Natural History Museum. It showed a man of the right period surrounded by instruments and specimens, and it fitted.
It was Jan Baptist van Helmont, the Flemish chemist. The identification was withdrawn.
That episode is a useful warning, because the internet is full of images captioned as Hooke that are in fact van Helmont, or John Ray, or various anonymous gentlemen of the period. If you search for his face you will find one, confidently labelled, and it will be wrong.
What exists instead is a reconstruction. The artist Rita Greer spent years working from Aubrey’s and Waller’s descriptions to produce painted portraits of Hooke, explicitly presented as informed reconstructions rather than discoveries. They now stand in for him in a great many places, which is a strange kind of afterlife: a face assembled from two paragraphs of gossip because the alternative was a blank.
What He Left Instead of a Face
There is one place where Hooke is unmistakably visible, and it is not a portrait of him.
Micrographia, published in 1665, contains the plates he drew himself from what he saw down his own microscope: the flea, the louse, the fly’s eye, the point of a needle, the edge of a razor, and the sectioned cork in which he found the little chambers he named cells. The fold out plate of the flea is nearly half a metre across.
Those drawings are the work of somebody who could see extremely well and render exactly what he saw, and they are the reason the book was a sensation. Pepys sat up until two in the morning with it and called it the most ingenious book he had ever read.
The other surviving Hooke is architectural. After the Great Fire he served as one of the City surveyors and personally staked out thousands of property boundaries, alongside a body of building work with Wren that is still being sorted out between them. The Monument to the Great Fire was designed partly as a zenith telescope, because he could not resist making a public column into an instrument.
A Book of Faces With a Gap in It
Portraiture was how the scientific age chose to remember people. A face in oils, in a gilt frame, in an institution, is a claim that this person belonged to the tradition.
Our book Portraying Science collects those portraits from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, arranged chronologically, in oil and tempera and engraving and early photography. Hooke is the conspicuous absence in any such collection, and the absence is part of the history: who got painted, and who did the commissioning, was never a neutral matter.
Newton sat for at least ten portraits. He was painted by Kneller more than once, and artists have been reinterpreting his face ever since. Hooke’s grave in St Helen’s Bishopsgate was moved in the nineteenth century and nobody recorded where to, so the remains are lost as well.
He is the best documented man of his century with no known face, and he described everything he ever looked at.
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