Portrait of Isaac Newton (Godfrey Kneller, 1689)

A 1689 portrait of Isaac Newton, then a 46-year-old Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, attributed to Sir Godfrey Kneller, the leading portrait painter working in England at the time and later the painter of Newton again in 1702. Newton is shown half-length, in everyday dark clothing with grey hair, in the plain, direct manner Kneller used for the scholars and scientists among his sitters rather than the grander poses he reserved for courtiers. The version held today is a copy after Kneller's original, executed by James Thornhill, in the collection of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge.