Blank greetings card with envelope featuring:

John Donne NPG 6790

© National Portrait Gallery, London

by Unknown English artist

This portrait presents Donne in the guise of a brooding, melancholic lover. The inscription around the oval ‘O Lady, lighten our darkness’ is a deliberate misquotation of Psalm 17, and implies the cause of Donne’s misery is a woman. Donne bequeathed this ‘picture of mine ... taken in the shadows’ to his friend Robert Ker, later 1st Earl of Ancrum (1578-1654).

Paintings can often undergo significant changes to their appearance through the addition of inscriptions and emblems, and the alteration of the background... more

Card size: 125mm x 175mm

Images are printed in their original proportions, within a white border.