A British window cleaner claimed he discovered the first portrait of William Shakespeare made in the author’s lifetime — an image which could be worth more than $264 million.
The painting, which Steven Wadlow’s antique dealer dad purchased from an Oxfordshire estate in the 1960s, has been analyzed and X-rayed by art experts who determined it dates to around 1595, when Shakespeare would have been 31-years-old, according to The UK Sun.
It resembles the only authenticated portrait that exists of the famed writer — but historians have yet to confirm Wadlow’s painting, which one art dealer valued at the whopping sum.
Wadlow, a window cleaner, feels like his claims are disregarded as “Much Ado about Nothing” and that the painting not been validated due to his blue-collar profession.
“Because I’m a working-class tradesperson, the people who have been studying this for years, they don’t want to find this out from a no-one,” Wadlow, 58, told The Sun.
Wadlow, who hails from Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire in Southeast England, has shelled out thousands in an attempt to prove the artwork’s authenticity, which hung in his father’s living room for decades.
His quest started in 2012, when his dad, Peter, now 92, was watching a Shakespeare documentary.
“He looks like our bloke above the telly,” Peter later told him.
The only confirmed painting of the Bard in his lifetime is known as the Cobbe portrait, and it hangs in the Hatchlands Park country house in Surrey.
It was made around 1612.
Wadlow, who now keeps his own version of the Bard’s portrait tucked away in a secure storage spot, has resigned himself to the sad conclusion that the truth behind the painting may never be brought to light.
However, he told the outlet, “Let’s get it out and talk about it.”
