Geoscience Reference
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againstadarkbackground,hisbodyturnedtotheleft.Dressedasadivine,thesub-
ject gazes impassively at the viewer from under the then recently mandatory fash-
ionaccessoryofawig.Everythingbutthefaceandhandsisgenericandcouldhave
been painted by an apprentice without even requiring the sitter to be present. The
face suggests to me someone who has not quite attained the dignity he desired and
who will stare down anyone who points this out to him; also someone who sees no
reasontogivemuchofhimselfaway.Hishandslookoutofproportiontothebody,
but there is something there of interest. The left hangs impassively at his side, but
the right is slightly raised. This is where we can catch sight of a curious detail that
the sitter has consciously staged for his viewers' benefit, for in his right hand he
holdsasheafofrolled-uppaper.Somethingiswrittenonit.Ifyoustandatthecash
desk and look up, it is hard to read what it says. When the woman at the cash re-
gister noticed me peering upat the portrait, shebroughtoverasmall step-ladder so
that I could get a better look.
Evenstandingatthecounter,youcanprobablyrecognisethewritingasChinese
characters,twoappearingbelowhisfingersandthreeabove.Thetwobeloware
jin
('metal' or 'gold') and a character that might be
gu
('ancient') or
she
('tongue'),
although an errant dot on the left side makes it impossible to be certain what was
intended. Of the three characters above his fingers, two are very clear:
gu
('an-
cient') and
li
('principle', also the unit for a distance of a third of a mile). The third
character,whichcurvesaroundthesheafofpaper,couldbe
zhou
('prefecture'),but
that's a guess.
Once I was up the ladder, I could better assess the calligraphy. I was looking at
practice characters written by a student in his first term of a class in introductory
Chinese. That is, he knew which way was up and which was down and had a fair
sense of how a character is formed. He has drawn
li
by making the line second
from the bottom longer than the bottom line, a fundamental error a teacher would
immediately correct. He has also simplified the third- and second-to-last strokes of
jin
into a single line, something he might have seen a veteran calligrapher do, but
thewayhehasdoneitdoesnotlookquiteright.AllofwhichistosaythatMichael
was no longer around when Hyde himself painted these characters into his official
portrait.
One wonders why Hyde chose to be portrayed with Chinese characters. He
could have posed more successfully with Hebrew, Arabic or Persian script. These
languages he knew well. Why did he want Chinese? Was it because any (albeit
small) number of people in Oxford could read Hebrew, Arabic or Persian, whereas
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